Lucia Festival
The Lucia festival is a custom that can be traced back to the festival of saints and is particularly widespread in Sweden as well as in Denmark , Norway and among Finland-Swedes and Danish people from southern Schleswig . The festival falls on December 13, the feast day of St. Lucia , which was the shortest day of the year ( winter solstice ) for a century before the Gregorian calendar was introduced in Sweden in 1752 .
Origin and development
Since December 13th fell on the winter solstice in Sweden for more than a hundred years before 1752, the Lucia festival is ultimately in the tradition of older solstice celebrations. However, it is difficult to reconstruct the ways in which today's Lucia Festival emerged from these celebrations.
A special Swedish expression of the festival can be proven for the Middle Ages at the earliest . From this time there are reports of celebrations with which the rural population marked the end of pre-Christmas agricultural work and the beginning of the Christmas fast. At that time, however, December 13th was not yet the day of the winter solstice, the calendar date of which has shifted over the centuries in the Julian calendar. From around 1760, contemporary witnesses report wearing white robes on manors in western Sweden for the first time. This is where the most striking element of the Lucia festival today arose, limited to a small part of the country and the population.
The Lucia festival has only developed into a national custom in the last hundred years. At the end of the 19th century, the Skansen open-air museum in Stockholm took up the Lucia traditions in western Sweden in order to preserve them for future generations. At the same time, the custom began to spread beyond its original boundaries among the population. This process intensified when a Stockholm newspaper first voted a Lucia in 1927. As a result, the Lucia Festival found a firm place in Swedish customs .
Other regions had similar customs: in the Franconian Jura it was not allowed to bake, spin or sew on the night of December 13th ( Luziennacht ). Various customs are also known from the Lechrain region.
In some areas of Bavaria , for example in the northern Upper Palatinate , in the district of Wunsiedel in Upper Franconia and in the area of Eichstätt and Ingolstadt , the name of Lucia was associated with pagan Perchten figures . As "Luzie", "Heuluzi" or "Luz", Lucia appeared here until the second half of the 20th century as a pre-Christmas child horror figure , similar to the woodpecker .
Today's form
Although the Lucia festival is named after a saint , it is not very ecclesiastical in Sweden today. The most important elements are wearing white robes and candles, consuming traditional saffron cakes ( lussekatter ), singing Lucia songs (such as the Neapolitan folk song Santa Lucia ) and choosing a local Lucia.
The celebrations usually begin in the morning in the family and continue in kindergartens, schools and at work. A girl, traditionally the eldest daughter in the family, plays Lucia. She wears a white robe, a red ribbon around her waist and a wreath with candles on her head. She is often followed by other girls ( tärnor ) holding candles, and sometimes star boys ( stjärngossar ), gingerbread men ( pepparkaksgubbar ) and gnomes ( tomtar ) in a proper procession. Due to the risk of burns, children today mostly carry electric candles.
The Lucia Festival is also enjoying increasing popularity in Norway, Denmark and Finland. In German partner communities there are also events to which guests from the respective city are usually invited. In Hungary, too, the tradition of the Lucia festival (Lucia chair) has been revived since 1990.
In Upper Bavaria, in the district town of Fürstenfeldbruck, the medieval tradition of swimming in the Lucien house was revived after the Second World War.
In Catalonia there has been the Nit de Santa Llúcia ("Night of St. Lucia"), a literary festival, since 1951 . At this time, some of the most important Catalan literary prizes, such as the Premi Sant Jordi de novella , are awarded. During the early Francoist dictatorship (1939–1975), the festival was always celebrated very discreetly in the early years due to the repression of the Catalan language and strict censorship . December 13th was chosen because it was also the death day of the writer Joan Crexells i Vallhonrat (1896-1926). It was not until 1975, shortly after Francisco Franco's death, that the public could be celebrated.
Connection with Saint Lucia
The extent to which the Lucia festival in its widespread expression in Sweden is actually related to Saint Lucia cannot be answered clearly.
On the one hand, the festival owes its current status to the fact that December 13th was the shortest day of the year in Sweden until 1752. In this context, it is noticeable that candlelight also plays an important role in other winter and Christmas customs ( Christmas tree , Advent wreath ). In addition, the festival was not spread nationwide as a church holiday, but as a custom .
On the other hand, the element of the candle wreath worn on the head fits descriptions of St. Lucia. From this it is sometimes reported that she wore a wreath of candles on her head for the sake of her free hands when she secretly provided other early Christians with food. If you go a step further, the white robe with the red ribbon tied around the waist can be interpreted as a reference to Lucia's Christianity , her affiliation to the rank of consecrated virgins and her death as a martyr . Lucia had vowed celibacy for Christ's sake and, according to tradition, died of a stab in the neck. In this interpretation, the white robe stands for her virginity and the red ribbon for her martyrdom.
literature
- Kerstin Risse: The invention of a tradition: the Lucia festival in Sweden . Master's thesis, University of Tübingen 2000, 98 pp.
Web links
- Customs for the Lucia Festival (English)
- Lucia of Syracuse in the Ecumenical Lexicon of Saints
- Background of the feast of Lucia
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b The Gregorian calendar reform was not carried out all at once in Sweden, but rather dragged on in a somewhat confusing way for more than half a century. As a result, December 13th to 1699 was the shortest day of the year, but not from 1700 to 1711, and by inserting February 30th in 1712 it was again from 1712 to 1752.
- ↑ a b Calendar for aarene from 601 to 2200 efter Christi fødsel Author = Richardt William Bauer Online = Google Books . Dansk Historisk Fællesråd (1993 reprint), Copenhagen 1968, ISBN 87-7423-083-2 , p. 100 .
- ↑ Andreas Hirsch: Believe me, that's the way it was because it was custom : Customs, tradition and superstition in a village. tredition, 2015. S. ISBN 9783732362042
- ↑ Frightful figure and queen of lights. Article in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung. December 2007.
- ↑ Erich Straßner: Berchtengestalten in Ostfranken. Reprint from the yearbook for Franconian regional research, volume 24, born in 1964
- ↑ Harald Fähnrich about Luz and Specht on onetz.de
- ↑ a b Encyclopædia Britannica. http://www.barkica.com/biography/Saint-Lucy . April 3, 2007.
- ↑ Quickborner Umschau . November 28, 2007.
- ↑ a b JTr, "Nit de Santa Llúcia" , Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana , of December 23, 2014