Seasonal Accessories

I love stories about old traditions and customs, I love exploring cultural interpretations of nature and life’s wicked ways. Well, here is a story for you today and it comes from where I was born.

In my country every first of March people give small tokens for health and wellness to each other. They are made as accessories of red and white wool cord. These accessories are called Martenici (from the month’s name March) and people are supposed to wear them every singe day and night (on their arm or on their clothes) until they see the first sign of spring, believed to be a blooming tree or a stork. Then they have to hang that accessory on a tree or a bush.

Symbolically speaking red and white are the colours that express health and purity. They also mean wealth and wellness. What Bulgarians do believe as well is that March is a female month when the weather expresses the typical features of a feminine character – moody and unpredictable. One day the weather is starting with sunny and bright skies and by lunchtime it becomes gloomy and dark with rain and even snow. The joke goes that March used to be a woman who had two partners. One of them old and cranky, the other young, strong and always fun to be with. Depending on the man March used to spend her time with, that was reflected by the weather.

Old people say that these March accessories, which I like to call transitional, used to be left under stones or thrown in rivers so to express life’s fluent and unstoppable way. If people left it under a stone, next year they would move it and by seeing what was under the stone could predict the whole year.

Another belief Bulgarians used to share was that if they chose one day in March they could tell depending on how that day went what the rest of the year would bring. You may wonder was March such a significant month (not December or January when the new year starts). In the old days people looked at March as the new beginning of the year because that’s when everything sprang to life again.

As for who shared these stories with me, meet Jeni Katalieva, a Bulgarian artist living in Zurich. She is the one who also made these beautiful accessories which can easily be part of your wardrobe all year long. Soon more about her.