The great oral heritage of European peoples lie on specific places, and is sometimes evoked by features of the landscape: mountains, rivers, caves, monuments or in the case of towns through their streets and corners.
Stories also are remembered in material form in archives, libraries, museums and other institutions of knowledge, in the form of recordings in different format, books and manuscript.
A storytelling place is a city, a town, a village, a landscape, etc. related in some way to tales and oral narration. This relationship could have a wide range of perspectives:
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Places related to a tale, a legend, a chant, even incorporating the name in its title: The Bremen Musicians, the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the Lovers of Teruel, the Laxdaela Saga, etc.
- Places that inspired an author, as Oxford, where the story of ‘Alice in wonderland” was told for the first time or Collodi, the Tuscan village from which the author of Pinocchio took his pseudonym.
- Places that are the birthplace or prolonged place of residence of an author, storyteller, folklorist, character, etc. To give some examples: Islay (Scotland), for John Francis Campbell and his collections of Gaelic stories; the island of Great Blasket (Ireland) for the storyteller Peig Sayers; Palermo (Italy), for G. Pitrè; Bijelo Polje (Montenegro) by the guslar Avdo Mededovic; Kakasd (Hungary) by the storyteller Zsuzsanna Palkó and the studies of the folklorist Linda Dégh; Maienfeld (Switzerland), where Heidi's house is located; Copenhagen (Denmark) by both Hans Christian Andersen and the statue of its character, the Little Mermaid.
- Places that hold story telling festivals as Guadalajara (Spain), Chevilly-Larue (France) o Dinefwr castle (Gales).
- Places that have a museum, archive or other cultural institutions related to stories and oral tradition, with a well-known literary tale or tales, or with the narration in a broad sense. In that category would be the Finnish Literature Society in Helsinki, the National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin or the Árni Magnússon Institute in Reikiavik.
- The European Network of Storytelling Sites and Towns ENSST aims to coordinate all these places where stories reside, in order to give them a projection beyond the local level, and to facilitate cooperation between institutions, states, regions and towns.
- Places closely joined to a tale, a legend, a chant or a collection of tales: Florence (for Bocaccio's Decameron); Canterbury (for Chaucer's Canterbury Tales), Peñafiel (for Don Juan Manuel's El Conde Lucanor); the Welsh landscapes featured in the Mabinogion or those which have a relevant place in the Icelandic sagas and many others.
The European Network of Storytelling Sites and Towns ENSST aims to coordinate all these places where stories reside, in order to give them a projection beyond the local level, and to facilitate cooperation between institutions, states, regions and towns.
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