Kupala Night (also Kupala's Night or just Kupala; Belarusian: , Russian: , , Ukrainian: ) is one of the major folk holidays of the Eastern Slavs, that coincides with the Christian feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist and the East Slavic feast of Saint John's Eve. In folk tradition, it was revered as the day of the summer solstice and is originally celebrated on the shortest night of the year, which is on 21-22 or 23-24 of June (Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia and according to Julian calendar on the night between 6 and 7 July (Ukraine, Belarus and Russia). The name of the holiday is ultimately derived from the East Slavic word kǫpati "to bathe".
A number of activities and rituals are associated with Kupala Night: such as, gathering herbs and flowers and decorating people, animals and houses with them; entering water, bathing or dousing with water and sending garlands on water; lighting fires, dancing, singing and jumping over fire; hunting witches and scaring them away. It was also believed that on this day the sun plays and other wonders of nature happen. The celebrations are held near the water, on the hills, surrounding that; chiefly, young men and women participate in these folkloric traditions. The rituals and symbolism of the holiday may point to its pre-Christian origins.
Names
Old East Slavic: , Russian: , , , , dialectal: ; : "bonfire in the field"; Ukrainian: , , , , , , Polesia: , Belarusian: , dialectal: Polish dialects have retained loans from East Slavic languages:
Podlachia and Lublin: kupała, kąpała, kąpałeczka
Podlachia, Lublin, Sieradz, Kalisz: kupalonecka, kopernacka, kopernocka, kupalnocka
In Old Czech (15th century), there is attested kupadlo "a multicolored thread with which gifts were tied, given on the occasion of Saint John's Eve; a gift given to boys by girls on the occasion of Saint John's Eve". In Slovakia, the folk kupadla "Saint John's Eve".
History and etymology
According to many researchers, Kupala Night is a Christianized Proto-Slavic or East Slavic celebration of the summer solstice. According to Nikolay Gal'kovskiy, "Kupala Night combined two elements: pagan and Christian." The viewpoint on the pre-Christian origin of the holiday is criticized by historian Vladimir Petrukhin and ethnographer Aleksandr Strakhov. Whereas, according to Andrzej Kempinski, "The apparent ambivalence (male-female, fire-wood, light-dark) seems to testify to the ancient origins of the holiday alleviating the contradictions of a dual society." According to Holobuts’ky and Karadobri, one of the arguments for the antiquity of the holiday is the production of fire by friction.
The name appears as early as the Old East Slavic language stage. Izmail Sreznevsky, in his Materials for the Dictionary of the Old East Slavic Language, gives the entries: "Saint John's Eve" (In Hypatian Codex under year 1262: ), "baptist" (no example), "St. John's Day" (). Epigraph No. 78 in The Cathedral of Holy Wisdom in Veliky Novgorod, dated to the late 11th - early 12th century, contains an inscription . According to ethnographer Vera Sokolova, Kupala is a later name that appeared among Eastern Slavs when the holiday coincided with the day of John the Baptist.
According to Max Vasmer, the name (Ivan) Kupala/Kupalo is a variant of the name (John the) Baptist ( ) and it calques the ancient Greek equivalent . Greek "baptist" derives from the verb "to immerse; to wash; to bathe; to baptize, consecrate, immerse in baptismal font", which in Old East Slavic was originally rendered by the word "to bathe", later displaced by "to baptise". The Proto-Slavic form of the verb is reconstructed as *kǫpati "to dip in water, to bathe".
According to Mel’nychuk, the word Kupalo itself may come from Proto-Slavic *kǫpadlo ( OCz. kupadlo, SCr. kùpalo, LSrb., USrb. kupadło "bathing place"), which is composed of the discussed verb *kǫpati and the suffix *-dlo. The name of the holiday is related to the fact that the first ceremonial bath was taken during Kupala Night, and the connection to John the Baptist is secondary.
Deity Kupala
From the 17th century, sources suggest that the holiday is dedicated to the deity Kupala, whom the Slavs supposedly worshipped. However, modern researchers deny the existence of such a deity.
Rituals and beliefs
On this day, June 24, it was customary to pray to John the Baptist for headaches and for children.