Spring is the wedding season in South Ossetia. People say that more weddings take place during the three months of spring than all the other months combined. Here’s everything you need to know about marital festivities in the region.
The very beginning
When a bride is brought home by the groom after traditional toasts, the festivities and dancing begin. In the very beginning, the mother of the groom comes out to dance with her head covered. Somebody must then steal ahandkerchief from her head. Then, this piece of fabric is cut up into little bits and given out to unmarried girls.
If a girl ties this scrap of fabric to her wrist and goes to sleep, people say she will see her future husband in her dreams.
The bride’s mother then puts a similar piece of fabric on top of her head.
“I didn’t believe this story at all, but I still tiedapiece of the clothI got from a wedding around one of my fingers. That night I dreamed that I was in some sort of village. I got up and I immediately begin to look for a broom. I found one, but not the one I was looking for - like the ones that street cleaners use. However, the stick and the broom head itself were lying separately. I looked for something to tie these two together. And then a boy came, tookthe piece of fabric off of my finger and tiedthe two pieces together with it. A few months later, I met the boy from my dream and married him. I still think its a coincidence. It’s more likely that we saw each other at the wedding. And this was my projection in the dream.”
Tomfoolery and good omens
When the bride comes out to greet the guests, her spot is taken up by the boys seated next to her. They do not let the guests sit down. A friend of the bride must ‘buy’ the seats and pay the boys.
Alan and Soslan got these seats before the food was even placed on the wedding table. The bride and groom will sit here. This is not the first time for these two kids. This time they hope to earn some money to fix a broken window. “We will not let them sit until they buy up these seats. Last time we made 2000 roubles [about USD 30]. We bought a football and got some shaurma.”
A little boy is placed on the lap of the bride in the groom’s home. They say that this way the couple will first have a boy. South Ossetia, however, is not the only place in the Caucasus where discrimination against girls is still common.
Financial transactions are a big part of wedding traditions here. The friends of the bride also demand a ‘buyout’ for the bride, otherwise they surround her and prevent her from leaving.
The relatives of the groom gift the bride a ring and items of gold. The mother of the bride gives the groom a ring. All the guests very carefully observe the process: the larger the ring on the hand of the bride, the larger the respect is to the family.
Another tradition that involves money is the stealing of the brides’ shoes.
Zarina - the friend of the bride - talks about another wedding she attended: “I sat next to the bride and all of a sudden someone had pulled off my shoe. The kids crawled under the table. They had confused me for the bride! Someone then told them that it was not the shoes of the bride and that they wouldn’t be paid for such a haul. They were afraid of me and didn’t bring it back the whole time. I had to walk about in someone else’s shoes throughout the entire wedding. When I was again a bridesmaid, I made sure to put on sandals that couldn’t easily be taken off.
The bride’s family is preparing a dzuar. This is a tree that symbolizes abundance. There must be chicken, sweets and alcohol on it. The dzuar must also be ‘bought’, and this is done by the friend of the groom who then ceremoniously takes the dzuar to the home of the groom.
“In 2014, my best friend was getting married. We started getting the dzuarready. We got together, us four girls. We boiled a chicken and bought some candies. We got the tree and put it on the window sill. The chicken we left in the refrigerator of course. In the morning, we decided to get the chicken out at the last moment, so that it would remain cold. And at the most important point we realized that our chicken was missing a wing, that someone had eaten it in the middle of the night. We decided to sew another wing onto the chicken. But the grandmother of the bride said we couldn’t, and that it would be better as it was. We received about 5000 roubles [about USD 80] and a sculpture for the newlyweds: an eagle in flight. Nobody noticed that one of the wings was missing. And we didn’t even tell the bride, our friend Kristina, about what had happened.”
The banquet
“Once I helped my mother cook Ossetian pastries for the wedding of our relatives. We cooked in two ovens enough for five-hundred people, no less than seventy different pies. I will never forget this day. Everyone said that the pies were tasty but I wanted to run from the kitchen and leave my mother and aunt by themselves. Of course, my state after just an hour was enough to keep me from doing that. On the street, it was 30 degrees Celsius, and by the stove it was closer to forty, maybe more. It was awful. But I remember that I thought up my current business then - a kitchen where you can order pies. I have more modern recipes and conditions, too. Now I only go to weddings to dance and have fun,” says Emma Tskhovrebova, who came up with one of the first kitchens offering pies-to-go in Tskhinval15 years ago.
Credits:
JAMnews