Koliada: the winter cycle, the twelve dishes and a calendar that moved

The winter observance in Ukraine is not one evening but a cycle running from Christmas Eve through to the middle of January, and its structure is agrarian before it is Christian.

It opens with Sviat Vechir, the Holy Supper. A sheaf of wheat called the didukh — literally grandfather-spirit — is brought in from the last of the harvest and stood in the corner of the main room, where it remains through the season. Twelve meatless dishes are served, one for each apostle in the Christian reading, one for each lunar month in the older one. The meal begins with kutia: boiled wheat berries with poppy seed, honey and sometimes nuts.

Kutia is the oldest element on the table and the most explicit. Wheat that has been kept whole rather than ground, sweetened, eaten first, and in many households a spoonful is thrown to the ceiling or set aside for the dead. It is a dish about continuity between the harvest, the household and the ancestors, and it long predates the feast it now belongs to.

The carolling

Koliadky are the carols sung from house to house between Christmas and Epiphany. Groups carry a star on a pole, sometimes with a nativity puppet theatre called a vertep, and are given food or money at each house.

The texts are worth reading rather than just hearing. Many have no Christian content at all. They address the household directly, praise the master of the house, wish for cattle to multiply and grain to fill the barn, and describe a world tree with birds in its branches. The Christian carols sit alongside these rather than having replaced them.

The vertep tradition — a two-tier portable puppet theatre, sacred above and comic below — is one of the oldest continuous forms of Ukrainian theatre and was performed continuously through periods when almost nothing else was permitted.

The calendar that moved

Until recently the Ukrainian Orthodox observance followed the Julian calendar, putting Christmas on 7 January. In 2023 the Orthodox Church of Ukraine moved to the Revised Julian calendar, and the state made 25 December the public holiday.

This was not a technical adjustment. Calendar alignment is one of the most visible markers a church can change, and the decision was understood by everyone involved as a statement about which liturgical world Ukraine belongs to.

The practical result for the next several years is that both dates are observed in different households, and in some families both are observed in sequence. Anyone scheduling work in Ukraine over that fortnight should assume reduced availability across the whole period rather than on one specific day.

Malanka and the old new year

The cycle closes with Malanka on the night of 13 to 14 January — the new year by the old reckoning — and this is where the observance is least domesticated.

In the Bukovyna and Podillia villages, and above all in Vashkivtsi, Malanka involves large costumed processions with masks: bears, goats, devils, an old man, a bride, and figures that have no agreed identity at all. Groups move through the village, block roads, demand payment, and stage mock weddings and mock funerals. The whole thing is loud, disorderly and closer to a European carnival than to anything ecclesiastical.

The Vashkivtsi Malanka is the most spectacular surviving winter rite in the country and draws visitors from well outside the region. If you can only attend one thing in the Ukrainian ritual calendar, this is a strong candidate.

Why the cycle held

The winter observances survived the twentieth century better than almost any other part of the ritual year, and the reason is structural. They happen indoors, within a household, without a priest, and they are indistinguishable from a family meal to anyone looking in from outside.

A tradition that requires only a table, a sheaf of wheat and people who know the songs is very difficult to suppress. That is why the wheat is still standing in the corner.

Related in this archive

• The folk calendar: a working year organised by ritual
• Skovoroda: the wandering philosopher and the three worlds
• Molfars: the Carpathian practitioners and what they were for

I have no explanation for why this cycle held. What I noticed over the years at tables I was invited to was this: all twelve dishes were prepared, nobody asked why twelve and nobody left one out. However the calendar changed, and however the date was argued over, that table was laid the same way.