Zdravka Mihaylova
Exclusively for GRReporter
In line with the times new figures of the day have appeared among traditional characters of the carnival menagerie this year. The website of the traditional masquerade in Kozani reads the title ‘International Monetary Debauchery’. The carnival procession among the traditional architecture of stone-built houses in Dimitsana, Peloponnese presented the wedding ritual for prosperity ridiculing the troubled relations between the Greek rulers and the IMF representatives in the spectacle ‘The Marriage of 'Troika' and Our Beloved Greece’ (Ο γάμος του Τρόικα με την Ελλαδίτσα μας). Children disguised as European currency of zero coverage, holding "shields" with well-rounded zeros followed by the euro symbol on them, walked among the carnival characters in Heraklion as well as sluggish masquerade characters who have ingeniously devised the thematic slogan of the procession and were inserted in gift boxes with the inscription "Beware of IMF bearing gifts". They were followed by a funeral procession called ‘Mourning for Greece’ and the exaggerated reactions of inconsolable grief and bereavement coming from “widowed” men in drag wailing behind veils of black crêpe naturally provoked bursts of laughter.
Like all major cities the municipality of Heraklion too has initiated a carnival in town. The surprise of this year's festival in the major municipal city of Crete was that Bulgaria was also invited to take part in it – with the group of mummers from Boyanovo village, Municipality of Elhovo, Yambol District. The group is a member of an international organization for folk art, winner of gold medals from different carnival festivals in Bulgaria. It was awarded the first prize - the Golden Mask – of the International Festival of Masquerade Games Surva 2011 held in Pernik. The mummers’ group was selected on the recommendation of ethnologist Nikolay Sivkov whose daily life resonates with the pulse of celebration during his numerous travels around the country for assessing and meeting the tradition.
QUESTION: Mr. Sivkov, how did the group of mummers from Boyanovo manage to convince the jury that it deserves to be awarded the grand prize of the festival – the Golden Mask?
NIKOLAY SIVKOV: The mummers’ custom in Boyanovo dates back to ancient times. Their masks are unique, they are a hundred years old. Mummers go energetically on the streets of the village on the first Sunday before Lent, one of them is chosen to be ‘Hajji’ and to guide the procession throughout the day. They choose another one to be the ‘Bride’ and dress him in female costume. They go around the village with a plough and a team of mummers yoked in it. Late in the afternoon the masked group gathers in the village square. “Hajji” gets on the plough, gives blessings for fertility and prosperity and the festivity wraps up with the mummers’ Dionysiac dances.
QUESTION: Masquerade games exist in different cultures, but this tradition is especially opulent in the Balkans. Therefore, as a first step towards giving Balkan dimension of the carnival procession the municipality of Heraklion invited a foreign group for the first time this year and the lot fell on Bulgaria. What is the deep symbolism of the festival that draws the line between both worlds – the upper and the lower world, the old one and the new one?
NIKOLAY SIVKOV: Mummers carnival games are enacted at the end of winter, on the boundary of the past year and the beginning of the new one when, according to beliefs, during the “unclean days”around Christmas this world merges for short with the hereafter and both good and evil spirits from the other world come among people on earth. They aim through these magical dances, scary masks, ring of copper bells to frighten and send away evil spirits and the weird sisters, and thus to bring plentiful harvest, health and prosperity for the people during the year. In these days from Epiphany to the beginning of Lent and Easter in the Orthodox calendar the world is re-created by putting an end to the chaos of the "unclean days" of transition until order in Nature is recovered.
QUESTION: What are the main characters in Bulgarian mummers play and how to interpret their main symbolic gestures?
NIKOLAY SIVKOV: Mummers under different local names - "startsi", "dervishi", "babugeri", "pesyatsi" and others - are known primarily in Eastern Thrace, Dobrudzha, in the Rhodopes. The rituals that are of male initiative character involve mainly young men. The main characters in the group are mummers, bride, brother-in-law, hadji. Their number ranges from 10 to 30-40 people. Mummers are recognized by their turned fur-coats and high hoods on their heads, decorated with mirrors and beads. The main attributes of mummers except plough and sword are the beam (isomorphic to the phallus) with which they touch childless women as it is believed that they will be able to conceive in this way. The ritual has two or three main points. After walking around the village from house to house the mummers perform symbolic first "ploughing and sowing" on the village square and roll the sieve, predicting the fertility of the year.
QUESTION: In Heraklion mummers from the Yambol village of Boyanovo performed along with four traditional groups from different parts of Greece - Drama, Kozani and Veria in Macedonia, and a group from the village of Gergeri on Crete. What similarities and differences a professional like you finds in these customs parallel for the two countries. How does your knowledge of archaeo-astronomy help for their reinterpretation?
NIKOLAY SIVKOV: It should be said to George Hindirakis’ credit - the artistic organizer of the event in the Municipality of Heraklion - that he has managed to gather almost the entire range of carnival traditions of the Aegean region. Unfortunately, due to rainy weather on the day of the carnival mummers from Boyanovo didn’t have the opportunity to perform the ritual in full. However their high colourful embroidered masks with plenty of mirrors on them, their folk costumes "of olden times", their wooden swords (kalachi) wrapped with red snakes sparked applause among the residents of Heraklion. With the rumble of their copper bells the mummers merged with the other participants in the Festival Parade – the "araps" from Greek Macedonia and became part of an overall Balkan motley carnival tradition. In fact, this was the purpose of the visit of the group from eastern Bulgaria - to show that there are no state boundaries for the ancient tradition of the winter-spring male masquerade games in the Balkans, be it in southern Greece, Bulgaria, Macedonia, even in Romania and that it continues to live and be celebrated by Balkan peoples beyond any borders – across united Europe.
No matter how different they are in terms of appearance, attributes, and probably in their rituals, they do not differ essentially: they are played at the same time – from Epiphany (Voditsi) to Midwives' Day (Babinden) and the aim of their rites and rituals is the same - to send away evil from the earth, to awaken the living forces of nature. Of course, this sacred order is typical for winter and spring holidays preceding Easter in Greece and other countries in Europe and unites them as a common festival tradition so widespread today. One mountain town – Pernik – has not been chosen by chance for the capital of festival cities in Europe this year. The festival tradition in the city has semicentennial history and the 20th Festival of Masquerade Games took place there in late January.
QUESTION: It was interesting to see in Heraklion - a city with centuries-old history under Venetian domination – the syncretism between urban masquerade parade, influenced by the Italian cultural tradition, and "rural" masquerades of the Balkans. After the gorge of the guests from Northern Greece and Bulgaria there followed the pandemonium of modern "carnivalists" disguised as "Desperate Housewives", cannibalistic tribes with bones stuck in their kinky hair, female vamps in retro models of Volkswagen, letkis of penguins etc. The mummers’ hoods of tradition were followed by peaked sombreros and dominoes of the modern masked ball.... Which "constants" of ancient rituals for prosperity and fertility do you find in them?
NIKOLAY SIVKOV: If "аraps" and "mummers" were representatives of traditional "rural carnival" then local masquerade groups were from European urban carnival type, which most likely is related to the Venetian period in the history of the city and the living link with traditional culture of medieval Europe. We spent a little time on Crete to see if that other carnival culture – the "rural" one – has been preserved in the interior of the island, among the shepherds and herds to make the parallel with ancient masquerade traditions in other parts of the Balkan universe. However, getting acquainted with the history and culture of Crete, we can make some comparisons and find similarities between the Cretan traditions and customs and those of Eastern Macedonia and Thrace. The first thing in common again is the time of the holiday. In Heraklion and in the village of Boyanovo, Bulgaria, where the mummer group comes from, this custom is celebrated on the same day – on Sunday, Meat Lent. This holiday is celebrated in all mainland and island Greece on that very day.
QUESTION: The most obvious parallel observed is the custom presented by the mummers from Yambol in which we saw characters disguised as "oxen" and "ploughman" and the custom from the village of Gergeri on Crete, in which there were also two men yoked followed by a ploughman and a plough.
NIKOLAY SIVKOV: The mummer holiday includes rituals of cosmogonic nature such as the symbolic plough and the sieve rolling on the square with which "hadji" - the king of mummers, sows the ploughed furrow. This custom of the sacred plough is presented on Bulgarian Christmas ritual bread with the image of a plough or a ploughman with a plough - an image of the heaven Ploughman Orion. In Mycenaean texts the constellation Orion is known as Axe (labrys). One of the symbols of the Great Mother Goddess of Crete is the labrys – doubleheaded ritual ax. The same ax (labrys) as a symbol of Orion is found in Thrace and Scythia. In other places, in Greece and Macedonia, the act of sacred ploughing has developed in the phallic cult, and beams and kalachi have phallic sense for Thracian mummers. Orion is multifaceted, but as a symbol of strength fertilizing Nature (the Great Mother Goddess), he is the same in the minds of all Balkan peoples.
QUESTION: Crete is the place of birth of one of the oldest civilizations on the European continent – the Minoan civilization. The island is located at crossroads and naturally combines elements of Eastern and Western rites. Which ones would you highlight?
NIKOLAY SIVKOV: Crete has been the link between cultures of the East and West from times immemorial. The pattern of Western urban carnival has prevailed there over the centuries while the memory of labrys-Orion and the sacred marriage of heaven and earth around the spring equinox have remained on the fringes of cultural memory as a half-forgotten archaic memory. The myth of the heavenly warrior-ploughman has lost its relevance over time. No one looks at the starry sky to see the picture of divine re-creation of the world and this picture itself has changed significantly over time, but the memories of distant epochs of the development of human civilization have remained in the rites and rituals, in scarce props of the original myth.
The mummers from Boyanovo ploughing the first three symbolic furrows with yoked necks during the sacred ritual of ploughing – don’t they remind to the modern spectator or participant in the carnival for the creature with the head of bull on a man’s body, the Minotaur of the Labyrinth, harnessed like them in space plough of the Heavenly ploughman - Orion? Or the "araps" of northern Greece, who put bags on their backs under their fur-coats with turned skin outside in to emphasize gibbosity, don’t they look like bulls humps? The "murder" of the Minotaur in Knossos by the ancient hero Theseus (Orion?) puts an end to the Age of Taurus (III millennium BC) and as result of the precession of the earth the world, including the Cretan civilization, enter the Age of Aries (II millennium BC), but traces of the cult of the cosmic bull, and the cult of labrys-Orion remain to this day in ritual practices of populations of the Mediterranean. And maybe that's why it is not a coincidence that the bearers of these "cultural traces" gather together in Heraklion, near Knossos today.
Nikolay Sivkov was born in Russia. He graduated from the Faculty of Slavic Studies at Sofia University. Currently, he is working in the Regional History Museum in Pernik as Head of Public Relations Department. His research interests are in the field of archaeo-astronomy and traditional rituals, including carnival traditions. He has participated in international conferences in Greece, Hungary, Estonia, Russia on the subject.
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