Professional paper
Wedding Customs of the Grižane-Belgrad Region at the end of the 19th and Beginning of 20th century
Katica Barbarić
Sanja Škrgatić
Abstract
The article provides a description of the traditional wedding customs of the inhabitants of villages and hamlets in the area of Grižane, a place located on the territory of the current Municipality of Vinodol. The period within the last decades of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century is covered, in which life in the countryside is gradually being changed and modernized, so the traditional customs are slowly fading. At the same time, the co-author of the article, Katica Barbarić (born 1935), refers to her own childhood memories and the stories of elderly inhabitants that she listened to as a young person, and she also uses the writings of the teachers Zorka Löschner Zastavniković and Dragutin Šepić. In the past, marriages were arranged by parents, with the mediation of an elderly female relative who passed the message to the girl’s parents. Only then, the suitors would arrive when they were certain that the marriage proposal would not be rejected. Upon the arrival of the bridegrooms wedding party in front of the bride’s house, negotiations took place, and sometimes they would come across locked doors, so they had to loudly call the household members. The wedding procession was led by a korovenj (the leader of the wedding party, waiving a flag accompanied by a virgin or two) carrying an ornate korenica (a bundle of black cabbage) and a small barrel with wine in his hands. In the house of the bride, a song inherited from antiquity called Kad se je kćerčica od majke dilila /When the daughter was separated from her mother was sung. The bride’s dowry was carried by girls and young daughters-in-law. The life of the young couple took place in a family unit, where everything was decided by the father-in-law and mother-in-law. Alongside with the disappearance of large cooperative families in the first decades of the 20th century, the custom of parents selecting a spouse for their children and arranging the marriage disappeared as well. The article contains descriptions of various wedding customs that have been preserved in their main content guidelines until the middle of the 20th century. Traces of individual customs and rules can be found nowadays in jokes and anecdotes that are used to entertain the wedding party.
Keywords
traditional wedding customs; the region of Grižane-Belgrad; Vinodol; end of the 19th century; beginning of 20th century
Hrčak ID:
331097
URI
Publication date:
12.12.2021.
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