S. Lackovits Emőke: Az egyházi esztendő jeles napjai, ünnepi szokásai a bakonyi és Balaton- felvidéki falvakban (Veszprém, 2000)

Festivals, holidays and customs of the ecclesiastical year

are in fact the fertility spells and village processions with mummery and collection of donations. The main players of the former were women, and those of the latter were men. The last three days of carnival - carnival Sunday, carnival Monday or Shrove Monday, and Shrove Tuesday - were the richest in customs and beliefs. Of these, carnival Monday was held to be women's day, women's amusements time, and known as Women's Carnival. With regard to customs, information is available from the 15th century onwards. Pelbárt Temesvári condemns the women's unbridled revelry, and considers this to be "the feast of Satan." The Tótvázsony Reformed minister János Oláh mentioned Women's Carnival in his study on the Balaton region, published in the 1834 Annual Science Collection. Parallels of the custom may be found along the Kapos, in the Rába area, and in the Bükk and Mátra region. It was practised in several villages of the Balaton Uplands. At our request, it was revived at the end of the 1980s in Raposka. Our photographs were taken here, in the Szent György hill press house of the late Mrs Gábor Lovász Margit Illyés. On carnival Monday, 8-10-14 women relatives, friends, or neighbours would get together and go up to the vineyard hill to celebrate. The day was known as "women's name day." They would gather at one of their houses, and in the afternoon leave together for the hill, for one of their cellars. Food was taken for the celebration, carried in baskets on their heads: boiled ham, sausage, bread, doughnuts, and a typical food baked specially for this occasion: rich, paprika scones. They set out the food in the press house, and also put wine on the table. They ate, drank and chatted in good humour, and at the end began to sing, in fact, they also leaned on each other and danced. This dance is the remains of former cultic dances. Peppered with high leaps, this was originaily an analogical act, with which they attempted to promote the success of the hemp crop. Following the dance, they went into the cellar, where they bumped their hips against the barrels, and even rode on the barrels, which was a fertifity spell to ensure an ample yield of wine. Men could not take part in the women's carnival celebrations, at most the members of the rustic peasant band providing the music. On this day, woman were to have free reign to enjoy the fun; it was not appropriate to tell them off for it. They did, however, take care both of themselves and of each other, and they could only drink so much as still to be able to sing the following, with no mistakes, at a fast pace: „My skirt has a hundred pleats, A hundred, a hundred pleats, but a hundred pleats. " VIII. Ash Wednesday The opening day of the Easter festival cycle is Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of Lent. The six week Lent preceding Easter became general from the 4th century. At this time the Church consecrates the ashes obtained from burning the Palm Sunday willow twigs from the previous year, and the priest draws a cross with it on the foreheads of the faithful, to remind them of their mortality. The ash