Contemporary Ritual Spectacles In the Streets of Polish Cities

Year, pages: 2015, 116 - 132

Observation of traditional folk rites taking place in contemporary culture frequently shows that today’s people are not able to break with tradition and, especially in Poland, with many rites related to the Church’s liturgical year. Since the Middle Ages the feast of Corpus Christi has been celebrated in Poland with ceremonious processions in which religious solemnity mixes with folk customs (picking leafy birch twigs) and the city life (road closures, decorated streets and buildings, altars). We have recently witnessed an ever increasing number of new examples that show believers celebrating publicly in the city streets: All Saints’ March with relics that is juxtaposed with Halloween, arrival of St. Martin on a horse, walking the Way of the Cross during Lent, Easter-time burning of the effigy of Judas in Skoczów and recently the Cortege of the Three Wise Men (commonly called the Cortege of the Three Kings). These processions are turning into noisy street events – as the believers are going out of the churches into the city streets, the way they participate in the religious ‘mystery’ is changing: it becomes a peculiar cultural event. Features of folk theatre are clearly visible in religious ceremonies (there are leading and supporting actors who are dressed up, royal crowns become mere common props, stages are erected for amateur and professional artistic groups). Many of the religious ceremonies are perceived only as a social gathering (“We all were having fun”) or a “street show”, which testifies to a tectonic crack between the traditional society and a modern one. Strong presence of this kind of ritual spectacle in the media and participation of teachers, students, preschoolers, scouts and a vast audience aside from priests and believers, and also politicians, devils, angels and medieval knights in the Cortege of the Three Kings, make the folkloristic analyse this phenomenon in the category of a fair or fete (festive, commemorative, educational), search for the limits of eccentric ideas that turn a ritual into a theatre, for trivialised signs of traditional folk rites and for folklorisation and hybridisation of contemporary culture, and thus the way of leaving the sphere of sacrum and entering the sphere of profanum.

Smolińska, T. 2015. Contemporary Ritual Spectacles In the Streets of Polish Cities. In Slovenský národopis / Slovak Ethnology, vol. 63, no.2, pp. 116-132. 1339-9357.

Smolińska, T. (2015). Contemporary Ritual Spectacles In the Streets of Polish Cities. Slovenský národopis / Slovak Ethnology, 63(2), 116-132. 1339-9357.