One of the advantages of the latitudes we live in is the beautiful autumn. The warm colours in a myriad of hues come to remind us that it is time to look towards winter, adapt our stereotypes, take out our warm clothes and much, much more.

Lyuben Karavelov – the prominent Bulgarian Revival-time poet, writer, a man of encyclopedic knowledge and great patriot – describes in his memoirs a sedyanka as he saw it in a Bulgarian village sometime around 1878:

“In the bigger towns and villages this old-time tradition has long ago ceased to be what it once was,” Karavelov writes. “It has been preserved only in smaller villages, and especially among the Shoppes (the region around Sofia). When autumn comes, a time when Bulgarians have gathered their crop and picked their grapes, they start getting together at sedyanki. Every lass and every young woman bring something to do – some sew, others spin, still others knit. The woman of the house gives them dinner while they work – each girl doing her own work, trying to outdo the woman next to her. And all the while they sing songs and tell tales. When dawn is upon them, the older women look at the work they have done and give praise to the most nimble-fingered among them.”

As was customary, the lasses and young brides would come first and start work, and only then would the lads come. They would go around in groups and sometimes go to several working-bees in one night. To give notice of their arrival they would sing loudly to the accompaniment of bagpipes or some other instrument and shout… They had a choice of where to go if they had already met their soul mate. In those patriarchal times it was the man that had to make the first move – it was unseemly for a girl to do so. Of course, there were ways to work around this – the girls would cast meaningful glances at the boys or would drop their nosegays “quite by accident”. But without any of these antics, the lads were fully entitled to sit next to the girl they loved. And to snatch the flower from her hair – a categorical sign of commitment. Then the boy would wear the flower for everyone to see, demonstrating that he had found his bride-to-be. The mother of the girl would know of this if her daughter came home without the flower in her hair. Exchanging a nosegay and apples conveyed the same message.

Sometimes the girl’s parents would reject the proposal of marriage. Then the boy would get together with friends to “abduct” the girl from the working-bee, she would hide away while his friends would go to fetch the priest. Or the two would elope, again from a working bee and go to the boy’s home. The boy’s parents would be wise to accept the new daughter-in-law, even if she entered their home in one of these two ways.

At the working-bees, the young would sing and tell stories. The older women would teach the girls ritual songs for the upcoming feast days. If the weather was clement, they would gather outdoors, around a big fire. On cold nights the biggest room of the house would be used. The woman of the house would treat the guests to different kinds of food, several times during the night, mostly fruit or corn on the cob. In the morning it would be the boys that were the first to leave, then the girls and the young brides. After the working-bees, came the weddings. As well as the numerous name days – right up till the end of winter.

English version: Milena Daynova