Ukraine celebrates St. John the Baptist’s Day (Bonfire Night) almost at the same time that the US does its Independence Day. In all probability, this is not an accidental coincidence. For us, the date of July 7, as July 4 for the Americans, is to a large extent the symbol of freedom- loving, disobedience, and, after all, independence. The ancient pagan rite has lived through a millennium and become an integral part of our people’s time-honored traditions. On this day, even the most “advanced” youth take off their roller- skates, switch off their CD-players, spit out their chewing-gums, and, together with the elders, willingly go looking for fern flowers, weave wreaths, sing, jump over bonfires, and have fun to their heart’s content.
Out of place during this feast are public rallies, tedious sermons and gobbledygook. It is perhaps for this reason that it enjoys such popularity. The wood Mavka (Ukrainian folklore character — Ed.) charms the world with its majestic beauty, leaving no place for rostrums and microphones. As if brewed in a fragrant concoction, St. John’s evening carries Ukraine, as a stream would do a wreath, somewhere far away toward what you hope is a radiant and joyful future.
Stetsivka (Zvenyhorod district, Cherkasy oblast) High School Principal Liubov Bilozirska, surprised the whole village, district and even oblast in the early nineties: she decided to organize the whole village’s celebration of St. John’s Feast. Young and old alike are said to have been walking to the pond. The village found its own musicians, actors, and connoisseurs of old songs and rites. The men donned their dress shirts, women pulled woolen plaid skirts and scarves out of their grandmothers’ chests of drawers.
What was important, in the long run, was not the outer side of the matter but what went on in human souls. July 7 became kind of a Rubicon for Stetsivka residents: having crossed it, they seemed unlikely to ever turn back. Indeed, the holiday was over but children kept bringing to school various old things which became exhibits at the local ethnographic museum, a special team went through the village to record songs and oldsters’ stories and to make inquires about traditional crafts. Having learned about this revival of local traditions, documentary film crews came to Stetsivka from the oblast center and the capital.
The initiative was highlighted in the press. The village lived and swirled in the whirlwind of these events for years. Stetsivka was visited by famous people, such as poets, political journalists, and high-ranking officials. Finally, the initiative was given the status of the Small Academy of Folk Traditions and Handicrafts. This gave another impulse to action. A hitherto ordinary and inconspicuous village, Stetsivka suddenly resonated throughout the country, with its academy members being invited to various festivals, contests, and campaigns. It seemed the process would just go on and on.
But in a country with so many beggars on the street you cannot celebrate forever. You cannot hold feasts year after year, while living standards plummet. Stetsivka fell silent. No new exhibits at the school museum, no singing groups walking around the village, no more stories from the old- timers: they have other things to do, for example, to hope to get their pensions. Teachers dream about their salaries and children about at least some sweets. Alas, even Kyiv’s academies barely eke out an existence, let alone an amateurish rural one. In other words, a host of problems cropped up. The main problem is lack of money: you cannot afford to buy a new accordion, send children to the oblast talent contest, or even mend the lead dancer’s boots. But, come what may, today most of the residents of Stetsivka as well as Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Lviv, Odesa, etc., are going to the banks and celebrate St. John the Baptist’s Day, their own small day of independence and rebellious spirit. Even if wearing worn-at-the-heel boots and faded scarves and playing a beaten up accordion, people will nonetheless pay tribute to the miraculous and still never seen bloom of the fern. Wreaths will float downstream, the bonfire will flare, and one of the wishes the Ukrainians may express this night is this: let all our troubles and superstitions burn out in St. John’s fire.
THE DAY’S MAIL
Faith in the Power of Good Still Lives
In our times, even a child knows that the fern never blooms, for it gets reproduced by spores. But as soon as you go into the thicket of that miraculous age-old forest and imagine feather-like serrated leaves the size of the tallest pine-tree, with dinosaurs slowly wandering among them, you immediately feel a glimmer of hope deep in your subconscious: what if...? What if the miraculous fern bloom suddenly shines only for you on the magic Bonfire Night, contrary to all the laws of nature, rational judgment, and obvious in everyday life? When a 10-11 year-old child, I read a book, from a series dedicated to famous people, on Tommaso Campanella, a monk and promoter of good, condemned by the Inquisition for disobeying the dogmas. Doomed to languish in a stone dungeon, Campanella wrote his dream treatise
Civitas Solis (City of the Sun) about a paradise on Earth, resting on Faith, Hope, and Love and blessed with wisdom and tolerance. He was called a utopian, but he was in fact a fern flower in the thick of the human primordial forest. The same applies to Prometheus, Jesus Christ, and Danko. Real- life and fictional, so different, and belonging to diverse faiths and times, one thing united them all: none of them held a weapon in his hands or evil in his heart. The faith in the power of reason and good, destroyed a thousand times, is still alive, as is the subconscious hope to find a fern flower on the Bonfire Night at least once in the lifetime of at least one generation. Never agree that it is impossible because whoever knocks has the door opened.
