Macedonia's Galicnik Festival keeps up tradition

17/07/2008

This year marks the 45th staging of the Galicnik Wedding Festival in a village southwest of Skopje. The festival celebrates a time when migrant workers returned home to be married in a traditional Macedonian ceremony.

By Marina Stojanovska for Southeast European Times in Skopje --17/07/08

Men perform a folk dance in front of St. Peter and Paul Church during a wedding in Galicnik, 150km southwest of Skopje. [Getty Images]

The annual Macedonian festival in the village of Galicnik, near the city of Debar, occurs on St. Peter's Day, when a selected couple has a traditional wedding. The July 12th event is a part of Macedonian folklore that reflects on the times when up to 30 weddings took place simultaneously in Galicnik. The mass return of migrant workers to the Galicnik region resulted in mass weddings. Migrants would return to their village before St. Peter's Day (Petrovden) and left for work on Mitrovden (November 8th).

This year a young couple, Igor Bundaleski and Dafina Grozdanoska, enjoyed a traditional Galicnik wedding. The celebration began Saturday morning when the future son-in-law decorated the wedding venue with flowers and fired a shotgun.

In accordance with tradition, the mother-in-law-to-be welcomes relatives with bread and a jug of water and dances the "mother-in-law dance". The groom traditionally shaves, which symbolises the end of bachelorhood.

The main part of the wedding takes place on Sunday when the wedding party visits the bride, arriving on horseback. The godfather brings a little boy with him. The boy sits with the bride's party, symbolising her ability to have a son.

In her house, the godfather presents a decorated banner and the bride serves the wedding party wine and rakija, a local brandy. The party then heads for the village well, where the bride, for one last time as an unmarried woman, fills jugs with water. In the village central square, the men dance the teskoto, a traditional Macedonian dance representing the hardships of Macedonian migrant workers through the centuries.

The event ends with a wedding ceremony Sunday afternoon at the Church of St. Peter and Paul. For greater authenticity, the bride, groom and the wedding party wear Galicnik peasant dress, which, bound with silk and gold, is one of the more colourful Macedonian examples of folk garb. The bride's costume alone weighs approximately 40kg.

This year, as every year, many attend the Galicnik wedding festivities. Tourists document the huge local attraction with photos and videos.