Trinity Sunday and the green rites of early summer

Trinity Sunday — Zelena Nedilia, the green Sunday — falls fifty days after Easter, and it is the one point in the Ukrainian ritual year where the pre-Christian layer is closest to the surface.

What is done

Houses are decorated with cut branches, principally birch, placed at doorways and in corners and left until they dry. The floor is strewn with fresh herbs — sweet flag, thyme, mint, lovage — which are walked on for several days and produce a specific smell that people who grew up with it recognise immediately.

Churches are similarly filled with greenery, and the vestments are green.

The Saturday before is a commemoration of the dead, with visits to graves. This is one of several such Saturdays in the Orthodox year, and it is the most widely observed after the Easter one.

What the rite is about

Three elements, each older than the feast they are attached to.

The greenery is vegetation brought indoors at the point in the year when growth is at its most vigorous — a straightforward act of sympathetic magic, transferring the vitality of the growing world into the household.

The commemoration of the dead at exactly this moment is not incidental. In the agrarian worldview, the ancestors are in the ground, the crop grows out of the ground, and early summer is when the relationship between those two facts is at its most urgent. The dead are consulted, fed and thanked precisely when the harvest is still uncertain.

And the week around Trinity is rusalna week, when the rusalky are said to be abroad. These are water and field spirits associated with the unquiet dead — young women who drowned or died before marriage. During this week swimming is avoided, certain work is not done, and in some regions the week ends with a rite of seeing the rusalky off, back to the water.

The rusalka question

The rusalka is worth a note because the modern image of her — a mermaid, a decorative figure — is almost entirely wrong.

In the ethnographic record she is dangerous. She appears in fields as often as in water, she is associated with the wind through the rye, and the traditions around her are about avoidance rather than romance. The nineteenth-century literary treatment softened her considerably, and the Soviet-era folklore presentation softened her again.

What the original figure encodes is a set of practical warnings — do not swim in early summer water, do not go into the tall rye alone, do not work on certain days — attached to a story that makes the warnings memorable. This is what most such figures turn out to be on inspection.

Practical notes

Trinity is a public holiday and its date moves with Easter. It falls in a period that also carries several other observances, and the working week around it is disrupted more than the single day suggests.

For anyone interested in seeing the rite rather than reading about it, the villages of Polissia and the Carpathian foothills keep it most completely, and the open-air museums stage a version. As with Kupala, the two are different things and it is worth knowing which you are attending.

Related in this archive

• Ukrainian cuisine and the produce economy behind it
• Easter in Ukraine: the basket, the bread and the layer underneath
• Religion in Ukraine: jurisdictions, numbers and why church questions carry political weight
• Ukraine Annual Review 2015: the worst year and the most reform

That the smell is the point must be the hardest thing about describing a rite — because it cannot be conveyed. I remember walking on the herbs on the floor of a house I was once invited to, and the reason I remember that day is not what was explained to me but that smell. I cannot explain what the tradition does; I can say what it leaves.