The carnival season (farsang) runs from Epiphany to Ash Wednesday, with its own characteristic customs and traditions. Cheerful winter-chasing events, carnival balls and festivities follow one after another. Carnival masks are in demand for fancy-dress balls, and the popular carnival doughnut sells well. At the festivities, out come the carnival mocking rhymes, chants and songs.
The carnival season runs from Epiphany to Ash Wednesday: it always begins on 6 January, but its end depends on Easter, which follows the phases of the Moon. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, the great fast before Easter, which follows Jesus’s 40-day fast. The whole Lenten period is longer than this, however, because only weekdays count: there is no need to fast on the Lord’s Day, Sunday. Ash Wednesday therefore falls on the 46th day before Easter. This is when the Easter cycle begins, with the day of confession and repentance. As penance, early Christians sprinkled ashes on their heads, since ashes remind us of our mortality. Today the rite of the ashes has become gentler: the priest draws a cross on the foreheads of the faithful with the ashes of blessed pussy willow.
Carnival customs
After the Christmas cycle, the carnival season is linked to more traditional customs than any other period worldwide. Its most characteristic events are masquerades in costume and mask, which were most often combined with collecting gifts, whether they took place at people’s homes or at the venues of festivities.
Carnival customs developed in Europe in the Middle Ages and reached Hungary through German mediation. The name itself comes from a Bavarian-Austrian loanword, vaschang. The carnival season falls during the winter break in farm work, which gave young people the opportunity to get to know each other, choose a partner, and hold noisy festivities and weddings. In Hungarian folk tradition, the first Sunday after Ash Wednesday, “wedding Sunday” (menyegzős vasárnap) and “son-in-law’s Sunday” (vővasárnap), the last Sunday of carnival, refer to this.
The licentious customs and masked games drew the Church’s disapproval in the form of various prohibitions. The festivities could not fill the entire carnival season, however; they were concentrated on the “tail end” of carnival (farsang farka), the last few days. This is the time of the carnivals, which is already linked to bidding farewell to winter and awaiting spring. This is when the Venice and Rio carnivals are held; Hungary’s most notable tradition of this kind is the Busójárás in Mohács.
Carnival Sunday
The first day of the tail end of carnival is Carnival Sunday (farsangvasárnap). On this day, young men ready to marry pinned the posies of the girls they had chosen to their hats. As it was also son-in-law’s Sunday, the young husband could drink at his father-in-law’s expense.
This day was also the time of the women’s carnival (asszonyfarsang). Men were not allowed to attend the women’s gathering. It was the only occasion in the year that women spent without work, making merry and dancing. It was held at someone’s house or wine cellar, or perhaps in the spinning house or the inn. In Transdanubia, the women’s cellar party still survives in some places today.
Shrove Tuesday, the middle day of the tail end of carnival, is a movable church feast. It is the last day before Lent when people can still make merry and feast – a day of masquerades and tomfoolery. In many places a straw effigy (kisze) or a coffin was burnt, symbolically closing the carnival season and burying the winter. It is the last day of the Venice Carnival.
Torkoscsütörtök
Torkoscsütörtök (“Gluttony Thursday”) was originally, of course, the Thursday of the week before Ash Wednesday, the opening day of the peak of the carnival season. Today’s practice – a feast on the day after Ash Wednesday – therefore contradicts the rules of Lent. In exceptional cases, however, the fast could be broken for a single day so that leftover food would not go to waste. Although Shrove Tuesday would have served that purpose, the folk expressions zabálócsütörtök (“guzzling Thursday”) and tobzódócsütörtök (“revelling Thursday”) are telling.
Carnival menus varied from region to region, but cabbage soups, jellied pork (kocsonya) and, above all, the ribboned carnival doughnut (szalagos fánk) were typical.
Author: György Péter János
Source: Programturizmus.hu