The Lost Art of Polish Springtime Carols
Who were the ‘alilujnicy’? And why do we know so little about springtime carols? Let’s learn about – and listen to – this forgotten, but fascinating feature of Polish music and folk history.
Carols are traditional songs accompanying a procession from house to house. This custom was a way of exchanging holiday greetings and, earlier, it was a magical practice. Carol singing is a pre-Christian custom common amongst the Slavic and Baltic peoples, and it was not limited only to the New Year holiday period. Christmas carols began to be called by their current Polish name of kolędy only in the 19th century; previously, they were known as kantyczki, rotuły and more broadly as pieśni nabożne, or pious songs.
Kazimierz Moszyński, in his Ludowej Historii Słowian (Folk History of the Slavs), emphasises that in ancient times holiday carols didn’t have an ‘empty, purely formalistic meaning as do New Year’s greetings we see exchanged in cities today’. Rather, ‘they were rather animated by a deeply-held belief in the actual fulfilment of good wishes sincerely expressed’.
A central feature of the custom of carolling was not only sharing greetings and offering serenades, but also the giving of gifts of food to the carollers. Carollers received – first and foremost – symbolic eggs. In later times, these gifts became more varied: they came to include sausages, baked goods and sometimes even alcohol and cigarettes. These gifts were known as wykup, meaning ‘redemption’ or ‘ransom’. A householder who didn’t provide the traditional gifts might be met with threats or curses.
Text
Thank you, dear lady,
for the wykup that you gave us.
And to you, dear householder,
May the Lord God bless you.
May God give you dew from above
so that you may prosper.
May God give you good horses
for you to take into battle.
Researchers say that springtime carols are a variation on New Year’s customs; after all, for people living in constant contact with the soil, springtime was the true beginning of the year, the start of work in the fields. New Year and springtime carols share many of the same lyrics and are marked with similar rituals (in both cases, evergreen branches are used, for example).
What are these springtime carols and customs called in different regions? Gustaw Juzala, the author of one work on springtime carols, provides the following information:
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Easter carols, known as ‘pieśni włóczebne’ or ‘konopielki’, are found in a narrowly-defined territory in the Białystok region. Springtime caroling groups spreading holiday wishes in a procession known variously as wykup, ‘chodzenie po racyi’, ‘chodzenie z wyrockami’ or ‘chodzenie z Allelujo’, with varying sets of songs characterising carolling in the parts of Podlasie bordering Masovia, and in the Łomża region, Kurpia, Masuria, and the Suwałki and Siedlce regions. In the south, allusions to the konopielki themes show up in the ‘river songs’ of the Lublin district, but those are sung at New Year’s, not in the spring.
What does the word ‘włóczebne’ mean? Zygmunt Gloger writes in the Encyklopedia Staropolska (Old Polish Encyclopaedia):
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This is what the custom was called of boys in Masovia and Podlesie making visits to neighbours’ homes on the second day of Easter bearing holiday wishes, declaiming texts, singing Hallelujah or konopielki and collecting painted eggs and pierogi for a holiday feast. In Lithuania and Rus, this custom is called wołoczebne.
In other words, włóczebne is a gift or an offering of food. The name comes from the times of Sigismund Augustus when he instituted a levy based on the size of one’s land holdings. The origin of the name is similar to the origin of the general term for carols, kolędy. It refers both to the songs and to the amount levied. The name kolęda comes from the Latin Calendae Ianuarie, the assumption of power by a new consul, which was accompanied by a special levy.
‘Konopielka’ is, in turn, a metaphorical term referring to young women. Literally, it means flax or hemp – in Slavic folklore these are associated with fertility and wealth, but also with funeral rites and contact with impure forces. Hemp seeds served as amulets that were supposed to ensure a young woman fertility and wealth; they were also used in romantic fortune-telling.
Picture display
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Postcard, 1928, photo: Biblioteka Narodowa / Polona.pl
On Polish lands, carols were sung for Christmas, New Year’s, Shrovetide, Easter and Pentecost. Today, in certain regions, New Year’s carols are still practised. Due to social displacements, springtime carols have been nearly completely forgotten – though in a few regions of Poland, their memory remained alive into the 1970s. In Belarus, this tradition continues to be practised.
Some people have tried to resurrect this custom or, more accurately, to reconstruct it. In Dziadówek, in the Suwałki region, alilujnicy (singers of ‘hallelujah’) are recruited from the Węgajty Country Theatre, and they are led by Wacław Sobaszek. He says:
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[…] theatre begins where ritual ends. [..] In every production, one can find something that is subjectively rooted in such events, that is, in that which is experienced by alilujnicy when they make their Hallelujah processions. ‘The Kalevala’, ‘The Canterbury Tales’, ‘The Inn for Eternal Peace’, or ‘Synczyzna’ – all those epics in some sense stem from Dziadówek.
Magdalena Bartnik recalls one such reconstruction on the pages of Gadki z Chatki (Chatter from the Hut, a folklore journal):
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The group of carollers is comprised of men and women, some of whom have come from far away – from France, Scotland, Germany. The backbone of the group is the musicians, and along the way, the harmonium is heard, the clarinet, the violin. The most characteristic element accompanying the carollers is the sound of the ‘ligawka’, a long wooden horn, heralding the ceremonies. Someone sings out ‘we are coming!’ We go from door to door, singing along the way. Song always accompanies the carollers; it is a bridge between the visitors and the local residents. At dusk we light a lamp to show us the way. We stop in each courtyard, beneath the window, and the song ‘Christ is risen’ can be heard. The doors open. The hosts welcome us and invite us in. Our encounter with them and theirs with us seems like a natural part of the way of the world. Carolling is a thread winding its way through time; it is a link to our mythical origins. The home becomes a mythical centre.
What do springtime carollers sing about? The aforementioned Gustaw Juzala developed a typology of carols. Carols of the domestic cycle consist of an extensive, if somewhat chaotic, litany of motifs such as: praise of the farm and its detailed description; compliments for the host’s rich attire; an appreciation of the plenty in the host’s household; remarking on the blessings of God and the saints for the fields of the host; an accounting of the major festivals of the entire year; praise for the richness of the harvest; prayers for the miraculous burgeoning of the host’s livestock; best wishes for the upcoming harvest; requests for gifts and the offering of holiday wishes.’
The majority of carols that have survived are directed at young women. They were sung beneath an open window, and a meal was generally served inside the house. Such songs dealt with a girl’s coming of age as well as her future engagement and marriage. Weddings were one of the central points of life and of the world, and that motif appears in almost every form of folk ritual.
Songs speak of peacocks, wreaths and rings. A peacock sheds its feathers, a young girl can weave them into a wreath. In an exceptionally beautiful Belarusian carol, a peacock swims down a river made of tears (girls’, divine, or eagles’). A wreath might be blown away by the wind – a force of nature – and the finder of the lost wreath might then be awarded with marriage to the girl who created the wreath. There also appear deer (in many places in Europe and Asia, they were worshipped as divine solar entities), trees (axis mundi), rivers (deep waters) and a variety of symbols related to apiculture, blacksmithing, mead and beer.
Alcohol accompanied every significant moment in a person’s life, as it helped one manoeuvre between various worlds and states of being. In some areas of Poland and Lithuania, it was even believed that water in wells would miraculously change into wine on Christmas Eve. Religious folk songs were sung.
Text
Hey, hey! The peacocks fly,
Moulting golden feathers
Which a girl collects
And weaves into a wreath
Which she gives to Jaś
And he, in turn, gives her shoes for the summer.
Springtime carolling was accompanied most often by bagpipes and fiddles and in later times by cimbaloms (similar to xylophones) and harmoniums (similar to accordions). Violins and bagpipes were once associated with forces of the underworld, with death and with the devil himself. Musicians were suspect of close ties to nefarious forces: they must, after all, have obtained their special talents from somewhere! Carollers were often accompanied by goats – or someone dressed as a goat – which was supposed to guarantee wealth and success (as the adage goes, ‘where the goat goes, the wheat grows’). It is interesting to note that carollers used to entertain their Jewish neighbours as well.
Why do we know so little about this custom? Even in the 30-odd volumes of Oskar Kolberg’s extensive study of Polish folk culture, he makes little mention of this matter. The explanation for this is actually quite prosaic. Kolberg set out on his research tour in the summertime when this repertoire – tied exclusively to one season of the year – was not being performed. Jan Czeczot collected many Belarusan folk songs, but his work has proven unsatisfactory to folklorists, as it is often comprised of poetic paraphrases.
Zygmunt Gloger, the author of the renowned Encyklopedia Staropolska, did make reference to konopielki. The broadest collection of these songs (in many cases, including musical scores) can be found in the work of Michał Federowski (1853-1923), an amateur ethnographer and author of Ludu Białoruskiego (The Belarusan People). During the Interwar period, such research was conducted by, amongst others, musicologists from the universities of Poznań and Vilnius; the National Library also collected recordings.
The person responsible for many of the recordings from the Vilnius area was Roman Padlewski (along with Hiennadij-Gustaw Cytowicz), the author of one of the most beautiful Polish versions of Stabat Mater. Padlewski perished in the Warsaw Uprising, and his recordings were lost in the burning of the Krasiński Library at roughly the same time.
Originally written in Polish, Apr 2020, translated by Yale Reisner, Feb 2021
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