An apple a day keeps the doctor away, says a popular English proverb. Besides being useful, sweet and aromatic, apples are also a fruit with deep symbolism that continues to resonate with humanity to this day. Most Christians associate the apple with the biblical story of the original sin: seduced by Satan who adopted the image of a snake, the first woman Eve picked the forbidden fruit and took a bite thereof, also luring Adam to taste it. According to folk legends, that fatal bite stuck in the man's throat, forming the so-called Adam's apple - an eternal reminder of the fall of mankind. The consequences of this act of our ancestors are well known - in a fit of fury, God expelled them from the Garden of Eden, putting an end to their eternal happiness and carefree existence. Thus, in Christian culture apple is the fruit of temptation and sin, the symbol of primordial guilt of humans, particularly of women, as the primary cause of all the troubles and sufferings.

It is interesting to note that actually the apple is not mentioned in the text of the Genesis: there we read of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. In ancient Hebrew texts that offer the first interpretations of the Bible one finds a variety of assumptions about the kind of the forbidden fruit: grapes (or wine), fig, walnut, palm, orange, pomegranate, or wheat. In apocrypha called “Baruch’s Revelation” the tree of transgression is the vine. It appears that the apple does not really grow in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, where the alleged location of the Garden of Eden was. How and why was the apple named as the fruit of sin?

There are suggestions that the reasons are purely linguistic. One hypothesis suggests it happened due to a mistake of the translator who confused the Latin pomum (fruit) with the French pomme (apple). Many authors emphasize the similar sound of the Latin word malus and malum, meaning respectively "apple" and "evil", perhaps the reason why because the apple started to be perceived as "the fruit of evil." On a deeper layer, however, one comes across another possible explanation – this is the special place of the apple in the folklore of European nations, where it is a symbol of marriage, eroticism and the continuation of the family.

If we look into Bulgarian traditions and folklore, we will find that the apple is present as a symbol of love, marriage and children. In folk songs, the young girl is often compared to a fresh apple and her slender body had the grace of an apple sapling. According to custom, when a young boy and girl grew fond of

each other, they exchanged an apple as a token of love. The apple - red or gilded, is present in the wedding rituals in the decoration of the wedding tree, the wedding flag and the wedding ram. Newlyweds eat an apple to have children. It could also replace the bloody garment of the bride after the first wedding night: instead of a blood-stained nightgown an apple was shown to the assembled wedding guests who stuck coins in it. It was believed that if a pregnant woman wanted her future child to have rosy cheeks, she had to go under an apple tree after sunset and look at its fruits.

The apple as symbol of marriage is found also in fairy tales: it is enough to recall the story of "The three brothers and the golden apple" where finding the stolen golden apple is the reason for finding a wife or the tale of "the unborn girl" in which a girl of dazzling beauty comes out of an apple cut in half. In the Gorni Voden neighborhood of the town of Assenovgrad (near Plovdiv), people celebrate a special holiday known as "The Golden Apple" that helps childless women conceive.

So, blamed by Christianity as the fruit of sin, the apple is "exonerated" in popular culture as a symbol of its core value - fertility understood in the broadest sense - as the fertility of the earth, of women and domestic animals. For Bulgarians there is nothing more precious than children seen as a continuation of the family and a hope for a happy future. A story tells about a childless couple who lived a quiet and secluded life while the home of their neighbors was constantly reverberating with children’s outcry and laughter. "What are you laughing at so loudly?" asked the childless spouses. "Well, we take an apple and we start rolling it between us and have fun," replied the neighbors. The man and the woman took an apple and began to playing with it but felt no joy. Thus they realized that it was not the apple but children that brought the joy into their neighbor’s house.

English version: Rossitsa Petcova