Święconka, or the blessing of the food

Święconka (rough pronounciation: shi'ven-tson-kah) is a Polish Easter tradition first recorded in writing in the 13th century, but which is definitely several hundred years older.

On Good Saturday, Catholic Poles will take a basket of food to church for a blessing. The most common traditional basket contains eggs, meat, cake, bread, salt and pepper, horseradish and beetrot sauce, and a  small lamb, made of cake, bread, butter, or sugar.

They represent all the food which will be eaten on Easter Morning, after the Resurrection, as well as all the food that will be put on the table that year. It's like saying grace before a meal, but with a long-term warranty.

The foodstuffs have their own particular symbolism. The eggs represent new life (adopted as they were from Slavic Pagan rituals). The bread, strongly symbolic in the Christian faith, stands for the body of Christ and the community which comes together like so many grains of wheat.

Children in particular like Święconka as they are usually the ones to carry a little basket. :) It's also a lot of fun to decorate- with boxwood leaves, lace, ribbons, little toy chicks...

After the short blessing, families will go pray at the grave in the church. Easter is also the usual time to refill the household holy water supply; churches sell bottles of it, or allow you to fill your own from a special vessel.

With this, I wish a peaceful and meaningful Easter to my Christian friends, a lovely Passover to my Jewish friends (the dates coincide this year!) and to everyone else, a sunny spring weekend :)

How to make a Mazurek Easter Pie

Mazurek- a traditional Polish Easter pie


The mazurek cake  is said to be a variation on a Turkish recipe, and has been a firm element of Polish Easter tradition since the 17th century. 'Mazurek' is also the name of a traditional dance, and Mazury (Mazuria in English) is a region in the North-East of Poland, green with forests and blue with lakes.

As usual, the pluralisation gets tricky when translated. Mazurek is one cake, mazurki are many.

Here is how to make some mazurki:


500 grams of flour
250 grams of butter
150 grams of powder sugar
3 egg yolks

Mix the flour and butter until it has the consistency of breadcrumbs.
Mix in the sugar and egg yolks until you have a dough. If it is too dry, add a little cream.
You can use an electric blender.
Wrap up in cellophane, refrigerate for about an hour.

This is your pie and cookie dough. Roll it out thin, tuck it into a pie pan, and be careful that it doesn't burn in the oven. And let the crusts cool before you take them out of the pans and pour in the filling.

The filling can be jam, caramel, kaymak... our family standard is chocolate, and you're on your own there- it's a matter of preference. The general rule is to sit a pot inside a saucepan of simmering water, and melt down a combination of dark and milk chocolate. You can add nutella, you can add fudge spread- just be careful that it doesn't get too hot and start clumping.

Pour it into the pie crusts, shake them gently to spread it evenly. And then start decorating.

Done? Congratulations! But you can't eat any of it until after the Resurrection!

Since the mazurek was supposed to be the crown of the feast which the family would wait for all through Lent, the idea is to make it as pretty as possible. As a child I used to play with cookies and that horrific coloured icing which comes in little tubes and requires samsonic force to be squeezed out...until somewhere around 2007 I discovered seeds.

Seeds look classy. They look sophisticated. They look rustic, quaint, traditional.

They taste better than the icing...though they are a mite less colourful!

So, for your appreciation and inspiration, here are all the Easter treats baked at my house in the last few years:

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

How to make pisanki

Poles didn't invent the celebratory decoration of eggs, but there's a lot to be said for how the tradition developed on the Slavic territory. The oldest decorated egg specimens found around here come from the 10th century, and they were made by painting a pattern of wax on the shell, then dipping the egg in a dye.

At the end of the post there's a tutorial that shows you how to make Easter eggs using that very technique. But first, let's talk semantics.

There are several types of decorated eggs in our tradition, and they all have their particular names.

Kraszanka (crash-an-kah) is an egg which has simply been dipped in dye.

Pisanka (pee-san-kah) is an egg which has been painted on with wax, and THEN dipped in dye.

Drapanka (drah-pan-kah) is an egg which has been dipped in dye, and then had a pattern scratched out on it.

Oklejanka (oh-clay-an-kah) is an egg which has been covered in a pattern made from pieces of plants, fabric, and wool.

Rysowanka (ree-so-van-kah) is an egg which has been drawn on.

If this is too much to take in, don't worry. Nowadays, you can get away with calling all of these eggs 'pisanki'. Why does it end with i? Because that's the plural of pisanka. Yes, Polish is hard.

The symbolism of the egg varies from culture to culture, but it is always powerful. For Slavic Pagans, the egg was generally a portent of new life and good luck. It is said that a meal of eggs was shared as part of one spring ritual, and the crumbled shells were sprinkled on tilled ground to guarantee a good crop. (modern composters will know that this is actually a very good way to nourish the soil)

With the arrival of Christianity, attempts were made to eradicate belief in the egg's magical properties. Well, a two hundred year ban on eating eggs during Easter didn't help much- the Church had to give in and repurpose them as a symbol of the Resurrection.

In Poland, to this day, the custom of sharing eggs at Easter persists. On Easter Monday, before any other food is consumed, a plate of egg slices is passed around. As we eat the eggs, we also exchange kind words and well wishes- much like we do at Christmas with blessed wafers.

I shot this tutorial with the help of my friendly neighbourhood folklorist Mariza Nawrocka-Teodorczyk (dziękuję!). Decorating eggs using wax and dye is actually quite easy! Have a look for yourselves:

Palm Sunday in a country with no palms

I thought about posting a tutorial, but it would take all year.

In the Christian tradition, Palm Sunday is the last Sunday before Easter. It commemorates the day when Jesus rode into Jerusalem, and people greeted him by waving palm fronds and crying out 'Hosanna!'. A remembrance of that day is still practiced in most Christian faiths by bringing palm fronds to houses of worship.

But there is a slight problem. We do not have palm trees in Poland.

We do, however, have extremely rich folk traditions which date back to pre-Christian times, and which have largely survived in the Catholic custom. Such a tradition has evolved from the colourful Slavic decoration of twigs and branches in anticipation of Spring to the Christian weaving of palms.

Łyse, in the Kurpie region.

Two places are particularly well worth visiting in Poland for Palm Sunday: the village of Łyse in the Northeastern region of Kurpie, and the village of Lipnica Murowana, just Southwest of Cracow.

Only there will you find such elaborate palms made out of crepe paper and dried flowers, so tall that they cannot be carried upright.


Łyse, in the Green Kurpie

The village of Łyse holds a contest for the tallest and most beautiful palm. People from all over the region work hard for the fourty days of Lent to make their entries.

Contest-winning palms set up around the old church in Łyse.

The day begins with a mass and a procession and is then occasion for a market where the locals sell their handmade wares- palms, painted eggs, lacework, pottery, carvings, as well as regional food such as honey, bread, meats and beer.

You can buy handmade palms and little dough goats and deer. For luck.

Łyse is in the Green Kurpie Forest, a lovely area.

But be not mistaken. These palms are not only a testament to the rich folklore of Kurpie, but also a sign of religious devotion. Palm Sunday does not mark the beginning of a feast, nor is it a festival, but is the first day of the week in which the Christian God was killed by the very people who first greeted him with such joy. These amazing palms are first and foremost an offering to Jesus and a hope that believers may be strong enough not to betray him again and again as his first followers did, and modern Christians have no doubt done many times in their lives.

Lipnica Murowana, Lesser Poland

A slightly different type of palm can be found in Lipnica Murowana, a small village in the southern mountains. They are less stocky than Kurpian palms, with different patterns, and show more green twigs, boxwood and dried flowers than their northern counterparts. And most of all, they are much, much taller.

These are the short ones.

This is the tall one.

Like Łyse, Lipnica Murowana has its procession, market, and festivities. And like Łyse, it holds its own contest for the best Palm Sunday palm.

There are several categories, but the one that has everyone biting their nails is the Contest for the Tallest Palm.

This gets VERY competitive. And there are rules that make it all extremely exciting. For starters, no nails or other metal elements can be used in making the palms- only wood, willow, reeds, green branches and paper flowers are allowed.

In the photo above, the second-tallest palm of 2011 is raised, with great care and caution.

Wires, ropes and lines from synthetic materials are also forbidden. In order to qualify in the contest, the palm has to stand upright without breaking, it has to be raised with no help from machines (hence the men in the trees guiding the lines, and those on the ground, pushing with special long forks), and the author must be able to wrap his hands around the trunk.

The palm in the photo above is the first prize winner of 2011, at 36.4 metres- that's almost 120 feet! I heard someone say the whole thing weighed about 600 lbs. It took about a dozen men half an hour to get it upright.

Here are some of the shorter palms, arranged around the statue of St. Szymon:

And for a height comparison, this is me with the palms I bought. They were made by local schoolchildren:

As an aside and a link to pre-Christian Poland, to which we owe a great deal of these colourful customes, it's worth taking note of the little wooden gothic church of St. Leonard which stands in Lipnica by the Uszwica river. If you go inside and walk around behind the altar, you will find that it is suspended on a worn, wooden pillar.

This pillar is supposedly a Slavic Pagan totem which once represented Svetovid, a four-faced god. Though the building as we see it now was built in the 15th century, the first church on this site was originally built in the early 12th century, in a Pagan holy grove. Instead of being destroyed, the sacred statue was used as a support for the altar. Poland had only been Christian for a few hundred years, and the old Slavic faith was still very much present. But here as everywhere, the new religion replaced the old one- albeit with an unusual amount of respect.

The old religion and the new.

Meta information:

Location of Łyse:

http://maps.google.pl/maps?q=%C5%81yse,+Mazowieckie&hl=pl&ie=UTF8&sll=52.322433,20.761276&sspn=0.171024,0.528374&oq=%C5%82yse,+mazowi&hnear=%C5%81yse,+ostro%C5%82%C4%99cki,+Mazowieckie&t=m&z=13

Location of Lipnica Murowana:

http://maps.google.pl/maps?q=Lipnica+Murowana&hl=pl&ie=UTF8&ll=49.858349,20.524864&spn=0.090193,0.264187&sll=53.364151,21.564928&sspn=0.083484,0.264187&hnear=Lipnica+Murowana,+boche%C5%84ski,+ma%C5%82opolskie&t=m&z=13

Drowning the Marzanna

Marzanna is an ancient pagan Slavic goddess, and one of her domains is Winter. On the vernal equinox which falls on March 21st, we make an effigy of her, set it on fire and then drown it in the river so that Spring will come.

My Marzanna from last year

So, where does this tradition come from?

Slavic Pagans, of course.

Although Christianity in Poland has worked hard for the last thousand years to assimilate and conceal the multitude of wonderful pagan traditions within its Catholic celebrations, the drowning of the Marzanna persists despite many attempts to eradicate it. In fact it's traditional for pre-school children to make the effigy in class and then have a little field trip to drown her. Sometimes, older children will cut out paper numbers- symbolising their bad grades- and throw them in the water as well.

Your typical Marzanna should be made of straw, and dressed in white- or, as they do it in some regions, wound out of rags and wearing a colourful maiden's dress. The puppet would be paraded through the village so that she might draw out misery, hunger, sickness, and all the evils of the cold seasons out of every house. Once that duty was fulfilled, she would be set on fire and dropped into the water- and woe be unto those who looked back at her on their way home. Even torn to shreds, the goddess could still take vengeance with a curse.

The burning of Judas which was meant to replace it somehow never really caught on...and I am glad. Marzanna must die as the Winter cedes to Spring, but she will return next season to live again. Her burning is a symbol of the natural order, while tormenting a straw effigy of Judas only serves to translate guilt into angry righteousness.

Another ancient tradition would have us greet Jaryła, the god of Spring and fertility, with dances and rituals. Slavic religion persists in several modern-day faith groups, but so far my attempts to get in touch with them have been fruitless, so alas I can't give you an account of anything more authentic than the secularised drowning of Marzanna.

So. I haven't done this in a while, for lack of good company, but last year I found two friends who thought it was a great idea. We made our Marzanna from wood, rags and hay, so she should decompose well. The Ner river is pretty dirty already, but there was no need to contribute to the pollution.

Hello, Spring, goodbye, Winter!

You do have to set her on fire before you drown her.

As a bonus, here's a rather lovely video of the traditional drowning, shot last year by some Poles in...Glasgow. ;) Apparently they're doing it again this year, on March 25th. If you're in Glasgow, go join in the fun!

Meta information:

Wikipedia entry on Slavic Paganism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavic_paganism


COSMOPOLIS- the authors of the Drowning Marzanna video:
http://cosmopolis10.blogspot.com/


Literary source: Polskie Obrzędy i Zwyczaje, Dr. Barbara Ogrodowska

Fat Thursday

I'll have a dozen of those, and a dozen of these.

The photo above shows a confectioner's stall at the market near my place. Normally the shelves are filled with different kinds of cakes- chocolate eclairs, honey gingerbread, puff pastries, jam buns...

But today, it is all pączki. Because today, my friends, is Fat Thursday, and custom declares that on Fat Thursday a person should eat as many pączki as they can. And then they should eat some more.

Last year, Poles are said to have eaten 95 million pączki. That's about two and a half per citizen.  You see, no one counts calories on this day(a pączek will set you back about 400 empty ones, if you really must know). If you don't eat, you'll be miserable for the rest of the year, superstition says.

But pączki are available year-round. Why are they so immensely popular on this one day in the year?

Afternoon delivery to the bakeries. All of those crates are filled with pączki.

Fat Thursday a.k.a. Tłusty Czwartek (pronounced twoosty tschvartek) is a mobile feast, falling on the thursday before Ash Wednesday. One week of Carnival remains; one week before sweets, fatty foods and festivities must be set aside for Lent. In Catholic custom, Lent is fourty days of fasting and religious reflection meant to cleanse and prepare the faithful for Easter.

The practical purpose of Fat Thursday is for bakers to use up all excess of fat and sugar before the fasting begins and business on sweet treats slows down. On this day, you might have a hard time finding anything BUT pączki in the bakeries.

Rose jam, marmalade, toffee, chocolate? So many different fillings...

The traditional pączek is a yeasty ball with a rose jam centre, fried in lard (vegetarians beware). But, according to the most famous Polish confectioners, the Blikle family, in the 17th century, pączki were stuffed with bacon.

Now, there is a common misconception in America, I have noticed, about this traditional Polish dessert called 'pączki'.  I'd like to clear that up.

First of all, we do not eat them on Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras is the Tuesday followed immediately by Ash Wednesday, effectively the last day of the Carnival before Lent, but it is not a feast celebrated in Poland.

We do not celebrate 'Pączki Day', either. That is a Polish-American tradition.

Second of all, they are not doughnuts. Doughnuts have holes in them and they are a completely different dough besides. And what you might think are doughnut holes are mini pączki, or pączusie.

Now, about the name itself. I have heard the word explained as 'packages'. Not so- the word actually means 'buds'. See the little tail underneath the 'a'? That makes an 'aw' sound, and the word is pronounced 'pawnchkee'. The confusion comes from replacing the letter with a regular 'a':

'paczki' 

are, indeed, packages, preferably wrapped up in brown paper and tied up with string.

 'pączki'

however, are buds, such as you would see on a tree in springtime, and though the cakes named after them do often come wrapped in paper, its colour is waxed off-white, and the string is ribbon rather than jute.

These are also pączki.

Note also that the word is plural, the singular form being 'pączek' (pronounced 'pawncheck'). One pączek, two pączki. Of course it is only natural that the English language would add an extra s and adapt the word as pączkis. :) (the aforementioned 'pączusie' is a diminutive, and indicates the 'pączek' has been shrunk to cuteness.)

If all this etymology has made you hungry, you should feel justified in running out to the nearest confectionery shop and bringing home as many sweet pastries as you can carry. It is, after all, Tłusty Czwartek.




Meta Info:


Wikipedia entry on Fat Thursday:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Thursday


Blikle on pączki:


http://www.tvp.pl/styl-zycia/aktualnosci/lukasz-blikle-w-tlusty-czwartek-badzmy-lakomczuchami/4080794

The 100-day dance

Though the Polish education system has seen changes upon changes in the last couple of decades, the crowning of a high school education is still the passing of the Matura- the so-called 'maturity exam' which earns the student a diploma and the right to attend university.

The exams take place in May, but it is customary to celebrate them in January, approximately one hundred days earlier, with a school dance called the Studniówka.

Think of it as a sort of prom, or high school ball- it's a very important affair. Some schools choose to hold it in their gym, but many will rent out a hotel ballroom instead, which makes it easier for alcohol to circulate. One glass of champagne is the official allowed amount (18 is the legal drinking age in Poland), but we shall not speak of what is poured under the tables. My own studniówka lasted until seven o'clock the next morning, and I distinctly remember the hotel ushers asking us to leave, saying 'enough already'. The trick of the dance is that none but the most confident students can be certain of graduating, and the exam is months away. That certainly adds excitement!

So, precautions are taken that have little to do with studying. One superstition claims that in order to graduate, one must wear red underwear to the studniówka, then wear it again, unwashed, to the exam. In Warsaw, where I grew up, the custom is to go to the Old Town after your Studniówka, find the statues of poet Adam Mickiewicz and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, then jump around them on one leg. An unbroken skip around Mickiewicz will guarantee you a passing grade in literature and language, while Copernicus takes care of mathematics and strict sciences.

Seems simple enough, until you factor in the January snow, ice, and high heels.

But the most important tradition of the Studniówka is the first dance: traditionally and unquestionably a polonaise. Its roots lie in 16th century folk dances, and it is easy enough to learn. Even with two left feet all you need to do is follow the pair ahead of you, in time with the majestic music.

In some cities, the dance has been pulled out of the gyms and ballrooms and brought to the streets. In the bitter cold of January, hundreds of students file through the city, led in the dance by a pair or trio dressed in the historical garb of the 16th century 'szlachta'.

These boys would do fine in suits, but I maintain that even the
homeliest of men looks like a prince in a żupan and kontusz.

As they say 'We hope we don't see you here next year!'

Bystanders are welcome to join the dance and make the parade grow longer- it starts out as a column of pairs and ends up spreading across the whole width of the street with as many as sixteen people in one row. In Łódź, the students have been dancing for seven years now. One of the traditions for the dancers is to grab the statue of Tuwim by the nose as they pass it by (I wrote about the Lodzian poet Tuwim last year)- this is supposed to bring good luck.

So, we do wish them fortune and a calm mind during their upcoming exams. But they shouldn't thank us, no matter how polite that may seem- it's bad luck!

Meta information

The music you hear in the video is the most popular modern polonaise, composed by Wojciech Kilar for the Andrzej Wajda film 'Pan Tadeusz', based on an epic poem of the same name written by Adam Mickiewicz- the great Polish poet mentioned above. Here is the clip from the film featuring the score and the dance:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq-VmzcJa3Y  

Wikipedia entry with links to articles about the clothes worn by Polish nobility 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kontusz 

Wikipedia entry about the Polonaise

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonaise

Cavalcade of the Magi

January 6th is the famous Twelfth Night, Twelfth Day of Christmas, and is traditionally celebrated as the day in which the Magi, or Three Kings, finally arrived at the manger.

In Poland, January 6th has been a public holiday since 2011, and much like on Christmas day, all the stores, banks, shops and offices are closed. In 2009, the first large-scale cavalcade (a public parade of the Three Kings and their symbolic courts) took place in Warsaw. With several hundred participants and tens of thousands of spectators, it's one of the biggest nativity plays in Europe.

Last year, it was freezing cold, but ten thousand people still showed up.
This year, there were more than three times as many!

And indeed, the whole thing is a large, open-air play. This year, more than 24 cities took part in the cavalcade, or as we call it in Polish, the Orszak Trzech Króli.

Pronounced Oar-shack Tscheh Crooley ;)

The public is encouraged to play along; paper crowns and song books are distributed to the crowd by volunteers.

Everyone gets a crown.

 The Kings Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar ride through town, in a chariot, on a horse and on a camel, respectively.

Right to left: Caspar, Melchior, Balthasar.

Their courts are color-coded: children in red capes and silver helmets for Caspar, who represents the continent of Europe, green capes and rice hats for Melchior who represents Asia, and blue capes and headscarves for Balthasar and Africa. The courts gather by Sigismund's Column in the Old Town Square in Warsaw at noon for the Angelus prayer, then set out to walk to Piłsudski Square where a family acts in a live creche.

But before they and the thousands of ordinary people following them can take their crowns off to pay respect to Jesus (who in Christian tradition is the King of Kings), they must face several obstacles.

Never fear: they are guided by the Star of Bethlehem.

This type of spinning star is traditionally used by carolers.

 Behind it come hosts of angels, traditionally played by blind and disabled children, and proper shepherds from the Southern mountains singing carols.

Among them walk the Cardinal Archbishop and clergy, mountain lifeguards, a choir, then at last the hosts of the kings.

The absolutely ADORABLE hosts of the kings.

But on their way to Betlehem, they will be sorely tempted, for they must pass through the Republic of Pleasure, where the minions of Hell will offer them fantastic, lucrative deals in exchange for their souls.

Hell's attorneys and business representatives, heckling passers-by to sign contracts for their souls.

Then, they will witness the battle of Good and Evil. On a pedestal, a choir of angels sings out virtues, while below, cloaked in clouds of sulphur, a band of devils screeches out sins.

Suspended in uncertainty between them is a man, who climbs up and down a ladder, struggling with his vices and ambitions, unable yet to ascend to Heaven, unwilling still to descend to Hell.

Poor fellow got a lot of exercise that day.

Betlehem draws near, but now the courts pass through the kingdom of Herod, who watches from his window and calls out: Where are you going? To see the newborn King?

Impostor!!!!

I am the only King, he claims, and demands to be told where the baby Jesus is, so that he may kill the usurper.

We know, of course, that the baby is in the manger, where the parade culminates with the giving of the gifts, and a blessing. Carols are sung out loud throughout the event, the public taking over in the gaps between mobile speakers.

That donkey was singing quite a lot, too.

And that's how it was this year. Additional attractions were the performances of several young childrens' choirs, a choreographed banner dance, and a beautiful Chinese-style dragon at the head of the Asian group.

Balthasar's camels, of course, were a highlight, as was the African-born King himself. Poland is a very pale-skinned country; though it is not exactly uncommon to see black people anymore, their presence in media, politics and other public events still causes interest. When you see someone who is not white in Poland, your first thought is 'a foreigner'; but the country is more diverse than many realise. King Balthasar, or rather mr. Martin Bol Deng Aleu, a native Sudanese forced to flee his country on account of his Christian faith, is a Polish citizen, and has been living here since 1996.

It looks like the Cavalcade of the Magi, new as it is to Poland, has already become a proper tradition. Check it out next year!

And here's a pro tip- if you're watching in Warsaw, and can't get a good view on account of the crowd, go up to the viewing terrace on top of St. Anna's church tower. That's how I took the first photo in this post.




Meta information


Orszak Trzech Króli website (Polish only)
http://orszak.org/


Wikipedia Entry on the Epiphany (Three Kings' Day)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphany_(holiday)