Pancake Week has started!

Today is the first calendar day of spring. Symbolically, it nearly coincided with the first day of Maslianytsia or Pancake Week, when people say goodbye to winter and welcome spring. This year Pancake Week will last from February 28 till March 6. Various shows, contests, folk bands’ performances and cooking festivals will be held throughout Ukraine. It is the last opportunity to eat delicious dishes to satiety before the Lent begins. For example, in Chernihiv they started celebrating Pancake Week last weekend and organized a borshch festival. In the town of Ivankiv, Kyiv oblast, the local cooks made a pancake that was 2.5 meters in diameter during the local festivities.

The ethnography center Mamaieva Sloboda and the National Museum of Folk Architecture and Rural Life invite residents and visitors of Kyiv to welcome spring with songs and dances just as our ancestors did, and to try pancakes with various fillings. “We’d like to invite everybody to celebrate Pancake Week the same noisy and cheerful way as our great grandmothers did, in the form of vechornytsi [traditional Ukrainian evening gatherings with music, songs, jokes, and various rituals – Ed.], accompanied by musicians and playful young women and girls,” invite the organizers to Mamaieva Sloboda. Pancake Week in Pyrohiv will offer performances by folk bands that will reproduce the rite of Kolodii and will sing popular songs. The festivities will end in a burning of the Shaggy Father (the Man of Straw), who symbolizes the winter forces.

In general, saying goodbye to winter and welcoming spring with songs, dances and various invocations, eating curd dumplings or pancakes to satiety, and commemorating defunct relatives is only a short list of the things done by our ancestors during Pancake Week. The week is divided into three parts: “welcoming Monday,” “large Thursday” and “farewell Sunday.” Each part has its specific character. On Monday people organize street festivities and make a straw doll. On Tuesday girls treat young men to pancakes and the mothers-in-law look after the daughters-in-law. On Wednesday mothers-in-law treat their sons-in-law, and on Friday mothers-in-law visit their sons-in-law in their turn. Sunday is the most important day of Pancake Week. This day people finish the festivities as well as the sate and cheerful week, visit all their relatives and neighbors to apologize for all the insults in order to become purer before the Lent.

At least, this is how our ancestors prepared for the spring. Nowadays ethnographic bands partially reconstruct the ancient rites, so that Pancake Week’s traditions aren’t forgotten.