Customs and Festivals

Koleda This winter festival, named after Kolyada, the Slavic god of winter, is known in Britain as Christmas.

Baba Marta The month of March is still personified in Bulgaria as Grandmother March, an old woman whose mood is as variable as the March weather. The first of March is a special festival day on which people wish each other “Chestita Baba Marta” (Happy Grandmother March) and give each other martenitsas, small tassels of white and red wool for health and good luck. This custom is rarely found outside Bulgaria, indicating that it is not Slavic in origin.

Trifon Zarezan is the patron saint of vineyards but he is an embodiment from the Thracian cult of Dionysus, the wild dark god of wine. On 14 February, there is a ceremonial pruning of the vine shoots, and a wine libation is poured onto the earth.

Koukeri

are masked male dancers, who wear fantastic, often animal like masks (like the one pictured above), and huge bronze cowbells round their waists. They carry sticks, which symbolise the phallus, in a spring fertility rite derived from the ancient Dionysian new year festival.

Nestinarstvo fire dancing

There are now only a few genuine Nestinari/Nestinarki (male/female fire dancers) left. They enter into a spiritual trance to dance on burning embers during the festival of St Konstantin and Elena in midsummer, in a relic of an ancient Thracian solar ritual.