Continuation of the theme of Ukrainian wedding traditions, through the eyes of a modern wedding photographer.
An integral part of the wedding custom is baking a loaf - this was the name of both the festive bread itself and the ceremony of baking it, accompanied by songs and jokes. The honor of baking a loaf fell only to respectable women who were easy-going and whose family life was happy. The baking process usually took place on Friday. And only in one case was a loaf not baked - if widows and widowers entered into marriage.
The wedding loaf was a rich wheat cake, decorated with flowers, leaves and a variety of dough weaves. Also used in decorating the wedding loaf were periwinkle - a symbol of eternal love and viburnum, symbolizing a woman's ability to bear children. Every stroke in the decoration of the loaf was not accidental - it symbolized wealth, happiness, harmony, prosperity, etc.
When the finished wedding loaf was pulled out of the oven - to the sounds of traditional ritual songs, the family life of the newlyweds was predicted by it. According to wedding signs, if the loaf turned out beautiful, even - it meant that the young people would have a good, happy, even married life; if it burst or broke - it predicted an unhappy marriage; underbaked - one of the young people had a tough character.
On Saturday evening, a hen party was held or, as it is now called, a hen party. Here, the young people said goodbye to their friends getting married and made a wedding tree - "giltse", "viltse", "rizka", "troychatka", symbolizing maiden beauty and virginity. It occupied a place of honor on the festive table near the loaf and accompanied the entire wedding ceremony. To make a giltsa, they took a beautiful lush tree branch and decorated it with flowers and ribbons.
The next day, from the very morning, the dressing ceremony began in the hut of each of the young. The bride was dressed in her best shirt (women kept the wedding shirt as a relic all their lives, it served as a family amulet and when the son went to war he took his mother's shirt with him), namisto (beads), an embroidered skirt and a beautiful wreath, with ribbons accompanying this action with traditional songs. The groom was also dressed in a beautiful shirt embroidered by his chosen one.
Now this ritual has remained, only slightly transformed - it was the wedding dress that came into fashion, at first it was red, and only a hundred years ago the fashion for a white wedding dress for the bride appeared. We will consider this fashion in other articles, now we will only note that France is considered the birthplace of the wedding dress. According to wedding custom, on the way to the bride, the groom was stopped many times and a ransom was demanded for her.
This could be just a treat or a symbolic sum of money. But the most significant jackpot, of course, was received by the bride's family, because the most inveterate bargaining began in the courtyard of the young woman. Having bargained on a certain amount, the wedding procession went to the church to perform the wedding ceremony. But how to do without obstacles this time? Now the young people poured water across the road or lit a fire, through which the groom had to carry his future wife - all this also served as a ritual of cleansing the newlyweds from everything before the wedding, and such actions were repeated 3 times.
After the wedding, the happy newlyweds returned to the bride's house, where they were greeted with bread and salt, sprinkled with rye (so that they would live in abundance), and the young wife invited everyone to the table. According to the traditional ritual, the meal ended with a ritual of changing the status of the bride, namely, unbraiding her hair. Here, in all corners of Ukraine, everything happened differently: in some places it was done by the bride's brother, in others by each of her family members in turn, in others by the best men. In Western Ukraine, the braid was not unbraided, but chopped off with an axe, while in Volyn, it was cut off with a knife.
And this was the starting point, after which the woman should always walk with her head covered with a scarf. At this point, the feast in the bride's yard ended, and all the guests went to the groom's yard. So that the bride would not be in an awkward position, her relatives, most often sisters, secretly brought the bride everything that a young wife might need: plates, spoons, linen, a shirt, an ochipok, etc.