Ivana Kupala: fire, water and the shortest night

Kupala is the summer solstice festival, attached in the calendar to the feast of John the Baptist, and it is the clearest case in the year of a pre-Christian observance carrying on under a Christian date.

The elements

Fire: a bonfire, leapt over in pairs, with the couple who keep hold of each other taken as a good sign. This is a purification and a courtship at the same time and neither reading excludes the other.

Water: bathing, and wreaths floated on a river with a candle in them. Where a wreath goes, and whether the candle stays lit, is read as a prediction.

Herbs: this night is held to be when plants are at their strongest, and herbs gathered now were kept for the year. That is not superstition alone — midsummer genuinely is the peak of the growing season for most medicinal plants.

And the fern flower, which does not exist, since ferns do not flower. The search for it is the point: a night on which people go into the woods looking for something impossible is a night designed for something else.

The European context

Bonfires, herb gathering and water divination at midsummer appear from Ireland to the Baltic to the Balkans. The Ukrainian version is a local variant of a continental pattern, which makes it older than any of the national frames now placed around it.

Why it survived so well

Because it requires no building, no clergy and no budget. A river, a fire and a summer evening are all it has ever needed.

That this belongs to a complex running across the whole of Europe was the most interesting thing here for me — the same night is kept under other names in other countries. Commonalities of that kind are older than borders. Why it survived so well I leave to specialists; but the shortest night falling on the same date for everybody is a reasonable place to start.