Customs in Bucovina

Without the hearty people from Bucovina no beauty would be trully valued and made to bring us joy. Regardless the age, they uphold their traditions of which they are proud and which they promote with every chance they get.

That is why the spending holidays in Bucovina, especially in the winter season, is one of those experiences that one should never miss!
In Bucovina, Christmas is the holiday that is best kept, perhaps more than in other places, with no divergence from tradition. Around Christmas, people recover or return objects borrowed throughout the village, because it is believed that it isn’t right to have lent things during the winter holidays.
On Christmas Eve, women  use to hide the spindle from the distaff or place a rock in the oven, believing that in this way they can chase away the house snakes.on the morning of the same day it was accustomed, untill recently, that the woman go outside, with her hands filled with dough, got o the orchard and touch every tree saying: „as my hands are full of dough, so shall these trees be filled with fruit next year”.
Christmas is a wonderful occasion to beautify the rustic interiors, the housewives placing now various herbs (basil, marjoram) under eaves. These herbs remain on display for a long period of time in the following year, this being easily observed in the lirycs of an old carol:

„Basil eaves,
To bring you luck.
Marjoram eaves,
To accompany you throughout the year.
Mint eaves,
To bring you long life.
Rose eaves,
To be of help,
To girls and boys
And to us on holidays.”

Christmas customs are prepared long before, once the Christmas fast begins (on the 15th of November), when the bands of carolers are constituted and the carols that are to be sang during the great holiday are learned.
In Bucovina, caroling is not only a custom but, through the way it is organized, it has become a real institution, with laws and specific rules. Children and youngsters gather, in time, in groups of six, in order to establish the future caroling crew, the selection being done regarding the social status, personal affinities, moral qualities or degrees of kinship. The leader of the crew called a bailiff, mate or turk, is also designated early on and he must be a good organizer, must have authority over the young, must possess an irreproachable moral conduct and must be a good dancer.
The provision for the Christmas Eve table begins in the early hours of morning, when the housewives bake the hogmanays so as to be „round as the Sun and the Moon” and a special type of hogmanay named „Christmas”, beautifully embellished, plaited in the shape of the number eight, hogmanay which was kept until spring in order to be used in the agricultural practices of the new year. It is now that the housewives prepare twelve kinds of fast menus (like crushed and boiled wheat, stewed prunes, boiled corn, stuffed with grits, chopped mushrooms with garlic, mushroom soup, baked beans, etc.), as well as fish delicatessen. The menus are placed on the biggest table in the house, but not before spreading on a beautiful tablecloth. Sometimes, underneath the tablecloth people would have places some hay, across the table the owners would have unravelled a red thread, and tied it in the form of a cross, and at the table’s corners they sat knobs of garlic. In the middle of the table they placed a round hogmanay and around it sat twelve plates in which sit twelve dishes.

In the evening, after the priest visits their house bringing with him the holy icon, the entire family dresses in their best clothes and gathers at the dinner table. Caroling, which is Christmas’ climax, has been preserved with great accuracy throughout the majority of Bucovina communities. The caroling tradition is started by children, who, in small groups, begin their singing, passing from house to house. In the past, the little carolers, before annoncing the birth of Christ, gathered in crews in order to ask forgiveness from one another. The carols sang for Christmas are considered as the most ancient literary forms, being present in our country since the Middle Ages.

After the Christmas holiday, the winter celebrations continue with the New Year, transporting man into a whole new world, which seems to be governed by hidden forces capable of influencing the normal course of life, rooting us in the ancestral myth, establishing unseen bridges between man and cosmos, man and environment, man and people. Each of the ceremonials has the role to mythologically transfigure the daily work (chores, crafts, household occupations etc.) as well as crucial stages from the individuals’ biological evolution (birth, marriage, death), in order to syncronize and harmonize them with the biocosmic rhythms.

The New Year’s celebrations include crews that sing the Plow song, the goat, the bears, the ravens, the kings, the crones and old men, the puppeteers, the brides and grooms, the devils etc, which are a lot richer in content.

Wishing for health and fortune by using the Plow song marks the beginning of the New Year’s eve. The children go around singing the Little Plow song, with a miniature plow, they obtain bells, scourges and whips adorned with wool and tassels. Besides the Plow song, on New Year’s day crews of young and mature men practice numerous other customs. The entire process of wishing for all that is good on New Year has to do with a complex folk theatre in which each character has its own role, text, costume, mask and props on the basis of a traditional staging that gets richer and richer till this day. A statistics of the characters involved in these traditions in Suceava county comes up with the following list: the goat, the stag, the bear, the horse, the peacock, the ostrich, the chicken, the tipcat, New year or Old year, the crones, the old men, the gypsies, the shepherds, the devils, the Turks, the Cossacks, the slaves, the buttons, the emperors, the generals, the pandours, the outlaws, the ladies, the brides and grooms, the doctors, the boyars, the merchants etc.

What could be more beautiful than Christmas spent far away from the hustle and bustle of the cities, in a place where it doesn’t appear to stop snowing, crews of carolers pass from house to house, the traditional meals are placed on the table and the Christmas tree awaits its presents? This is the perfect picture for a Christmas which seems to be taken out of a child’s fairy tale but which is actually real in villages.
Moldavia and Bucovina are among the regions where these holiday’s traditions and customs are still kept sacredly.
Here are some of the culinary secrets of Christmas spent far away, among the snowdrifts, in guest houses and tiny hospitable houses situated in the heart of Moldavia and Bucovina:

• In Moldavia and Bucovina, people fast until Christmas, and the traditional dishes based on meat are placed on the porch, under the window, without anybody touching them.
• Traditional Moldavian sarmale, sour Moldavian borsch, Moldavian quickie with horseradish (pig boiled meat, chicken or beef with cream and horseradish souce), cakes and borsch soup with smoked bacon are just a few of the Moldavian traditional dishes.
• The Sarmale contain smoked bacon and a special sauce, made from broth, borsch, meat juice, milk and wine, necessarily served with cream.
• The housewives prepare cakes with grinded nuts, raisins, cocoa and poppy.
• Chisca is specific both to Moldavia and Bucovina, being a pig gut stuffed with rice and minced meat, boilled and then fried.
• In both areas housewives prepare round hogmanays , which people resemble to the Sun and the Moon, thus investing them with  magical powers.
• In the last days of the fast, the people from Bucovina prepare fast dishes, which are made holy on Christmas Eve’s night by the village priest. Among the Christmas dishes one can fiind meat juice with noodles, trotters made from rooster meat, chop stew (fried pig sausages, fried pork chops, sheep’s cheese, fried eggs and polenta), meat with horseradish and cream, smoked sausages, smoked ham, cake with nuts and poppy and a traditional cake with cornmeal.

SOURCE: gastropedia.ro