Strange Origins of a Strumica Carnival

Strumica, a little town quietly tucked away between the crossroads of Macedonia, Bulgaria and Greece and has a not very widely known tradition of throwing an extravagant celebration called the Strumica Carnival.

Among the first observations that one will carefully note upon arrival in Strumica is a strange air of sexual tension in the air. Disproportionate numbers of scantily clad girls, the warmth of Balkan machoism, hand gestures, nonconfrontational cursing of female (particularly maternal) body parts, the smell of kebobs in the air, and a wide array of luxury German automobiles.

Upon closer inspection, one will note that everyone excitedly awaits the coming of the Strumica Carnival. If you ask when and where it is, you will get a blank stare. If you then ask what it means, or why it's celebrated you will hear three different versions.

a) the carnival is a Christian holiday

b) it's something we do in Strumica, lots of people come here, and everyone gets drunk. By the way, did we mention that Strumica has a 3-1 ratio of women to men?

c) i don't know

The Strumica carnival (Струмички Карневал) usually held sometime in February contains one obvious reference to it's pagan roots - the latin. The name carnival (carnivali - goodbye meat in latin) most likely began as a pagan tradition celebrating the Winter Solstace (or the shortest day of the year), but was later Christianized as Christmas by Christians. One minor problem, here the holiday is Christianized under the guise of Trimeri (Three Days in Greek) as the feast of Trimeri (a Christian holiday) which somehow is supposed to connect to Lent, however if you ask the people in Strumica, they will tell you the carnival is actually a fertility rite instructing newly wed women on sexual acts. Doesn't sound very Christian to me.

So, back to the Winter Solstice problem. The Winter Solstice christiamatically aligns more with Christmas (December 21st or so), but the Strumica Carnival occurs somewhere in mid to end February.

A little digging on Wikipedia quickly reveals a possible source:

"Lupercalia was a very ancient, possibly pre-Roman pastoral festival, observed on February 13 through 15 to avert evil spirits and purify the city, releasing health and fertility.".

"... Lupercalia subsumed Februa, a possibly earlier-origin spring cleansing ritual held on the same date, which gives the month of February its name.The Lupercalia by name was believed in antiquity to have some connection with the Ancient Greek festival of the Arcadian Lykaia (from Ancient Greek: λύκος — lykos, "wolf", Latin lupus) and the worship of Lycaean Pan, the Greek equivalent to Faunus, as instituted by Evander.[1]"

sorry, I forgot to mention the priest dressed in Goat skins and the burning of Vestal Virgins. My bad.

So in short Lupercalia slash Faunus has something to do with wolves and a horned god impregnating cattle. Hitorically, fertility was a always an important theme in agrarian societies (such as Strumica, where most of the revenue is generated by the farmers of the valley).

The Romans of course borrowed the children's books from the Greeks, who had a holiday named Lykaia celebrating the transformation of men into warevolves involving nocturnal rituals, human sacrifice, and references to their own bulls. Upon recent re-inspection by Greeks, the festival seems to predate even Zeus:

"modern archaeologists have found no trace of human remains among the sacrificial detritus,[16] but recent discoveries at the mountain-top ash-heap altar that Pausanias saw but was reluctant to pry into, reveal that it was much older than the Classical Greeks themselves realised. Early twentieth-century excavations at the site had revealed nothing earlier than ca. 700 BCE, but the Greek-American interdisciplinary Mt. Lykaion Excavation and Survey Project excavated a trench and detected ritual presence at the site at the beginning of the third millennium BCE,[17] a thousand years before Zeus was worshiped in Greece.[18] A Late Minoan rock crystal seal bearing the image of a bull was a notable surprise."

Little by little, the story starts to resemble the true nature of the Strumica Carnival... an age old excuse to get as trashed and naked as possible, while wearing a goat costume so the grandmas can't tell your parents where you were last night.

Kids, where where you last night?