Folklore - where? - around Bulgaria. What can be sweeter than honey? “He who has tasted honey, knows how sweet it can be, an old Bulgarian saying goes. Its words hide a deeper meaning since Bulgarian folklore tends to attribute to honey far more symbolic dimensions. The Bulgarian tradition knows various ways of using the gift of the bees and God, as popular belief has it. However, honey was much more than food. It had a ritual role and accompanied the life of man from birth to marriage and in the afterlife. Honey is present at celebratory and commemorative meals, and is part of the rituals for health and healing practices. It is revered as the elixir of life and immortality. That is why the abundance of honey is important and there is a special blessing in the welfare rituals. On Christmas men wish the master of the house that his bee hives reproduce by the thousands. In a similar vein on New Year’s Eve the masked dancers, the koukeri, give a blessing to the bees wishing them to be as numerous as the snowflakes, and also to return to their hive with a lot of honey. In spring the girls used to sing songs about bees and honey because of the onset of the new farming season. People would place skeps on the trees made of wooden branches and coated with honey on the inside in order to attract the new swarms of bees to them. In the villages that had centuries’ old traditions in beekeeping the farmers managed to produce as many as 90 kg of honey out of a single hive. In ritual blessings honey was raised to the status of the most important fertility symbol, the wheat. People wished one another more white grain, more yellow millet and honey and butter. The old saying ”Let your life path be as smooth as butter, and as sweet as honey” is alive to this day. In the old days the newborn baby was welcomed to the world with a ‘honey’ blessing: “May you buzz like a bee and be sweet like honey, the mother and the grannies used to chant during the first ritual bath of the baby, but what they actually meant by this was that they wished the baby to be healthy, dexterous and industrious, and altogether a good and kind kid. The words were affirmed with ritual bread with honey glazing. Similar bread was made for weddings. There used to be a tradition that the bride placed some honey and butter on top of the gate and the threshold before stepping into her new home. The mother-in-law welcomed her with a bowl of honey and a bowl of salt so that the newly weds had joy in their life despite the hardships. Another saying also embodies the life philosophy that good and evil, joy and pain go hand in hand, “Honey is as sweet as it is bitter”. Another one is meant to lift the morale of a man discouraged by the never coming success of his ventures, “Bees go into the mud, too, but come up with honey in the end. To the Bulgarians the bee is a symbol of the never tiring and modest working - without ostentation, but nevertheless productive and useful. The greatest acclaim a girl singer or a boy player could receive was to say of her that she had a voice of honey, and he had a shepherd’s flute of honey. Kind and well-meant words were compared to “honey dripping from the mouth”, which is also a euphemism for flattery. It was believed that a wrong word and mismatched action could ruin the best impression of a person, or in other words, “a spoonful of tar can ruin an entire cask of honey”. Solid pragmatism and sarcasm meet in the expression that “he who pokes in the honey, sucks his fingers” meaning that those who have direct access to benefits will not hold back from taking advantage of it. But after all, the popular wisdom said that “health and life were sweeter even than honey”.
Posted on: Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:22:47 +0000