Carnivalesque customs of Thrace: The timeless value of satire practiced through rituals

 By: Marina Siskos

Published in the Greek Herald https://greekherald.com.au/culture/history/carnivalesque-customs-of-thrace-the-timeless-value-of-satire-practiced-through-rituals/?fbclid=IwAR383O4Bg0MzPE2Pm8_FHXAupa8cPpwKjAE8PHhNAUiAAHw3k8mFNlyKDhw

Carnival customs are observed on the first Sunday of Christian Orthodox fasting, The Tyrian Sunday, alongside most significant Thracian customs

Thrace is Dionysus’s birthplace. Dionysus, or Bacchus, was the god of the grape-harvesting, winemaking, vegetation and fertility. Dionysus was the son of Semeli and Zeus (Moutsopoulos, 2016). Thracian festivities celebrated to this day are sharply reminiscent of Dionysus’s characteristic shenanigans (Moutsopoulos, 2016).

The customs known as Kopek Mpehis and the Monks, as described in narrative skillfulness by the master of ethnographia, Georges Vizeynos, date back to the antiquity. Representations of the carnivalesque customs and practiced are preserved within the daily cultural practice, thus reiterating and revitalizing a set of rituals that remain undying and incorruptible: Landmark customs, Kiopek Mpehis and the Monks, are two outstanding cases. Kiopek Mpehis is a parody of an oppressive institution from the days of the Ottoman occupation and a cultural reference to the quick wit of the Thracian people who dexterously outwitted the conqueror, under his nose. The ritual is climaxed with a symbolic battle and a plea for land fertility.

As Bourdieu (1977) points out, practices can circulate and reproduce culture without their meanings articulated in discourse or consciousness (Fiske).

Carnival customs are observed on the first Sunday of Christian Orthodox fasting, The Tyrian Sunday, alongside most significant Thracian customs (Megas, 2004). The advent of the nighttime signifies the lighting of a great carnivalesque fire (Megas, 2004).

Thracian Customs

In the Kiopek Mpehis custom, outstanding are the elements of satire and the humiliating tricking of the Ottoman conqueror, who is met who resistance raised by the locals (San Simera).

Satire and swindle are the main constituent functions diachronically recreated in the folklore ritual of Kiopek Mpehis and the Monks, another custom described later on, Houhoutos or the King, which are essentially the same practice that refers to the unjust provisions enforced by the conqueror, on the one side, and to the astute resistance, on the other side. The incarnated functions are left intact, irrespective of any occasional, superficial additions and regional differentiations-the name, the roles (dramatis personae), the disguises. Kiopek Mpehis is attributed to be bequest by refugee ancestors and survives as an active memento of the Thracian peoples’ strong social unity, as is evidenced through history (San Simera).

Binary oppositions and the ritualistic plea for land fruition comprise the narrative of the other Thracian custom-the Monks. The perceived relationship between death and resurrection has been an influential one since the antiquity, as observed by Papadopoulos (2011). Frazer, and eminent anthropologist, is cited in Burkert (1997) as follows: “they fathomed the fruitfulness and the degeneration of vegetation, the birth an the death of living creatures as the outcome of the fluctuation of divine powers, male deities’ birth and their demise…They believed that the practice of specific magic rituals would invigorate god, the source of life, in his effort in the struggle of life and death. They ideated that they could reinforce the divine elan, even that they could achieve his resurrection”. In 1888, Georges Vizeynos published his folk culture study titled “The Monks and Dionysus’s worship in Thrace”, in four installments in the weekly paper “Evdomas” (Tahopoulou, 2019).

Vizeynos’s dissertation on the carnival commences dialogically, between the narrator and a fictional character, vested in the role of a skeptical reader (Tahopoulou, 2019). The conversational narration as a literary choice is intentional: it brings together the scientific conclusions and the essence of the carnival. The reflective narration transcends the scientifically established work and initiates a reflective narration of the relationship that covertly binds the scholar to his the subject of his study. The Monks parody the scientific work and defy the conventional boundaries between the literary genres, ad well as the principle of homogeneity in the texts’ register (Pefanis, 2019).

The clashing depiction of the Christian and the bacchanalian monks undermines the sanctity of the monastic life; it is satiric and laughter-provoking. The figure of the Christian monks is parodied and the monks now transform into caricatures of a satiric play …. “Flirting neither in a secret nor a discreet manner, raging, playing foolishly with their prayer beads, crying and yelling, amidst unceasing laughers, they forcefully chased their bacchanalian fellow-aficionados…”.

Meaning

Of the many customs bequeathed from our ancestry, eventually only a few survive. Others fade away, whereas others are systematically repressed by the collective memory. Only the stories that are substantial to our contemporary narrative survive.

Bakhtin and Bourdieu show how the culture of the people denies categorical boundaries between art and life. Popular art is part of the everyday, not distanced from it. The culture of everyday life works only to the extent that it is imbricated into its immediate historical and social setting, says Fiske.

Worshipping rituals are surprisingly long-lived, having admirable versatility and adaptability, so that they ford through the centuries and from religion to religion, preserving their divine-religious core intact, within which lie primordial beliefs and superstitions still not consciously decoded, yet, deep-rooted in the psyche and the habits of laypeople (Terzopoulou, 1997).

The longevity of texts forms a hierarchy within the culture, one usually identified with the hierarchy of values (Lotman et al., 1978).The repetition of ritualistic practices adds interest to the festivities and carries their unique significance for the people. Customs will always be interpreted in the context of contemporary society.

We understand culture as the nonhereditary memory of the community, a memory expressing itself in a system of constraints and prescriptions (Lotman et al., 1978).

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