Yesterday I attended a Slava at a friend’s house. This is Macedonian custom celebrated once every year. Families in this neighborhood, on completion of the building of the family home, open the bible at random and take from the opened page the name of the saint. This family holds dear St Demetrius as their patron. They have an open house in their home every year on this day, serving no meat or dairy products, only the bounty of their farmland.
Yet in Rebecca West’s book about Yugoslavia, first published in the late 1930’s ‘Black Lamb and Grey Falcon’ she writes when she attends one such celebration in Ohrid “I was also enchanted at the opportunity of seeing a Slava (the word means ‘Holy’), which is a distinctive social custom of the Serbs. It looks like a birthday on a very generous scale: all day the family keeps open house and offers food and drink and amiability to all friends and acquaintances and even passing strangers. But it is an inherited date, which never varies from generation to generation, and it is said to be the anniversary of the day on which the ancestor of the family who first forsook his paganism received baptism. This is plausible”.
As time goes on, I am sure I will be offered more meanings for why Slava is celebrated, as I recall that one was being celebrated later this month at my new site and one at another volunteers site
No comments:
Post a Comment