A Bookkeepers Balkan Update: The Galichnik Wedding--Travelogue

The Galichnik wedding is a major cultural event that happens every year in the days around St. Peter's day (July 13th... aka yesterday) in a small mountain village for which the wedding is named. Several years ago I travelled with some friends to see the opening dances of the celebration. It was quite an experience.

To get there we drove through some amazing landscape behind Mt. Mavrovo including a high dry desert-like place that reminded me of California. There at one point we saw hundreds of fluffy off-white sheep descending the hills with the voice of the shepherds guiding them. It was an amazingly gorgeous gentle and flowy site. Even though they were sheep, it gave me an visual picture of perhaps what Solomon meant when he said, "Your hair is like a flock of goats decending from Gilead."

After coming up out of the high valley the road took us through twists and turns of heavy forest until finally we arrived in the small village of Galichnik, nestled there in the mountains. It was a very quaint village with one main street through town and the homes tucked away on dizzying slopes.

Like the old dirt road that once led to the village, life is hard and twisty for the locals there. In the winter times they can get snowed in for weeks and months. There's not much to attract tourism throughout the year either and I read recently that as a sad result the one and only hotel has had to close. The one day a year the village seems to rely on for it's survival is the Galichnik Wedding and the hundreds (thousands?) of people who come to see it.

The people of this village try to earn a living for their families back home as migrant workers for most of the year. Some work as far away as Germany. Though each year they all try to make it back to their families by the middle of July, on St. Peter's Day. This is a greatly anticipated time as the village looks to the road to see once again the faces of their loved ones, and, for the young women, the young men they whom they will marry. This is how the Galichnik wedding was born over a century ago.

Back in the 70's the dirt road was paved and this long-standing tradition was made into an official cultural event in an effort to draw in tourism as well as to preserve the heritage of songs, ceremony and dance of the region. Dances like the "teshkoto" (Тешкото) "a symbol of the difficulties and invincible clever people much suffered but always successfully passing over the various troubles in the period covered with a web-net" (quote from MyMacedonia). All the participants in the wedding ceremony and events are dressed in the traditional national dress of the area.

My friends and I were there for the first day of this 3-day event. As we'd arrived early we sat at a local cafe and enjoyed good conversation and coffee while breathing in the fresh pine-scented mountain air. Ahhhh. While sitting there a couple people came up who knew one of my friends. They are from Galichnik and like many others had returned home for Petrov Den. We joined them for a nice walk along a mountain trail with some breath-taking views.

At one point we came across a rock that had an indentation in it. They said it was "God's footprint" on this place of earth. There was more to the story, but sadly I've forgotton it. I did take a picture of it as you can see. :)

Late into the summer day you begin to hear the rhythmic percussion of the drums echoing through the mountains. Young men had been practicing their dances earlier in the day, but with these drums you knew the main procession was coming and that the ceremonies will soon begin. Spectators gather in the stone ampitheater above the main village fountain and at the base of the church while dozens of men and women in national dress of reds, golds and beige take their mark.

At this point the bride and groom tie a flower boquet to the top of a Macedonian flag, which is then displayed prominately on the grooms house. Bang! Bang! Bang! The grooms father (?) fires the shotgun into the air and the dance of the mother-in-law begins where she leads while holding flower-decorated bread on her head and a pitcher jug in her hands. Next follows the teshkoto dance mentioned above. Teshkoto means "the difficult one" and we could see why... among the dances amazing moves is a balancing act on the drum. After this there are more dances and then the bride is taken to the three fountains. We missed this last part, though, because it was well beyond dusk and we needed to get back to town. My hope it to make it back to see this whole three-day event perhaps next year.

Below is a video from my first visit there in 2003. It begins with the sound of drums echoing in the mountains and then moves on to show some of the dances.