The food system is one of life essentials, where the key features of popular worldview and lifestyle of people are relatively evident. Traditional cultural manifestations of having or refusing meals are interrelated with life style of an individual, with a subsequent procedure, type of food, rules of conduct typical of festive meal. These rules are of universal nature and are represented in folklore (sometimes implicitely hidden), and often appear in mythological plots.

Keywords food food culture feast ritual holiday myth folklore.

A comparative analysis of the Armenian “Three eggs” and Italian “Three oranges” fairy tales corresponding to number 408 of the international clas¬sifi-cation of “Types of folk tales” by the German philologist Hans-Jorg Utter, shows that the transition from one age group to another had different manifestations and symbolic codes in the folklore of different peoples, but they all considered the rite of passage into premarital maturity to be the most important, since not everyone managed to overcome it.

Keywords initiation ritual group of Armenian and Italian fairy tales Hans-Jörg Uther archaic thinking orange egg fairy tale symbol plot myth.