Or the New Year’s Eve soothsaying for love and spouse of the Bulgarians

According to the Bulgarian tradition, the early risers on the first morning of the New Year were the unmarried girls and young men. It was no surprise, as the January 1, or St. Basil’s Day, was considered the most appropriate time of year for fortune telling vis-à-vis the love life of the young. The next day, St. Sylvester’s Day, was the only occasion they could benefit to speak out their hearts under the guise of various rituals.

The young used to be impatient for the first morrow of the New Year to dawn. They believed it was the day that held the key to the most important question: were they to marry and, if yes, whom were they to marry in the coming year. The ritual of fortune telling is known as Vassilitza, after the Bulgarian name of St. Basil’s Day, Vassilyovden. The same ritual has various names depending on the region where it was practised: doyla, laduvane, etc. On New Year’s Eve one or two unmarried women called ‘prustenarki’ (from the Bulgarian ‘prusten’ meaning ‘ring’) collected the rings and other jewellery items, bracelets, necklaces, earrings, of the other unmarried girls and attached a bunch of flowers to any one item. Later the items were all laid in a metal pot filled with water. In some parts of the country the ritual allows for young unmarried men to join in, and the girls collect either rings, or pocket knives from them, and attach a bunch of flowers to them before placing them in the pot, too. The pot, however, had to be filled with water from a spring fetched by a maiden who had kept silent on the way back. Thus, the name ‘mulchana voda’, or ‘silent water’. Of course, the elements had to add up magical powers to the enterprise; that is why the pot was left for the night for the stars to exercise their effect, and not just anywhere in the open air, but under a rosebush, generally considered the most romantic and love-like of flowers in Bulgarian folklore. And finally, tradition had it that the pot was covered with a red veil as token of the future marriage. Each of the steps of the ancient ritual was accompanied by a great deal of singing and merrymaking. The majority of songs are descriptive of the ritual itself.

On the next day, the girls go to the home of one of them, whose parents are both alive and well off. The unmarried men and women gather round the pot with the jewellery items and the flowers, and the girls begin to sing. The lyrics usually foretell the happy marriage, the perfect match, or family welfare. But the wishes are made in the form of riddles. The riddle, however, is built around a distinct feature of the trade or character of the future groom. For example, a man ‘who rides on a horse, and holds a falcon’ was of noble origin, or the saying ‘golden bracelets jingle on the bed sheet’ was used to refer to a goldsmith. Some of the rhymes used to designate characteristic patterns of women’s behaviour: tidiness, laziness, etc. No matter whether the guess turned right or wrong, everyone was happy and busy with the thrill of love hopes for the New Year.

St. Sylvester’s Day, usually marked on January 2, was the long awaited occasion to answer the love expectations. The holiday is related to the performance of one simple ritual that looked like a religious act. Before dawn, the bachelors enter the barns of the houses of their beloved ones or of unmarried young women. And they start cleaning the dirt in the barn. Here is Vesselina Guenova from the village of Karantzi near Veliko Turnovo in Central Northern Bulgaria with the details:

“On St. Sylvester’s Day, January 2, the lads clean the barns of the cattle and then the young dance in a chain on the village square. And it was there that the girls could offer a lad a towel in token of her fancy.”

In some villages the custom has taken the shape of ‘open courting’ on the part of the lad with the girls’ family inviting the young man to dinner, which is a symbol of the outright approval for the choice of sweetheart their daughter has made. 

English version by Radostin Zhelev