Malanka and the masked new year

On the night of the old new year, in a band of villages across Bukovyna and the Carpathian foothills, the entire male population of a village puts on a mask and goes out. Villages of several thousand people produce processions of hundreds.

What actually happens

Groups form by street or neighbourhood, each with its own set of characters, and go house to house. At each house they perform, are given food and drink, and move on.

The characters recur: the bear, in a costume of straw or sheepskin that can weigh a great deal; the goat; the doctor; the gypsy; the emperor and his retinue; the bride, always played by a man; and Malanka herself, also played by a man.

Modern figures have joined them — politicians, celebrities, whatever the year produced — which is entirely traditional. A carnival that could not absorb the present would have died.

The masks

Made locally, sometimes over months, from leather, wood, fur, horn and increasingly from anything available. Some are inherited. The best are extraordinary objects and would be museum pieces anywhere else; here they are worn in the snow and repaired afterwards.

Why it matters

Because European masked winter carnival largely died in the twentieth century, and this is one of the few places where it continues at village scale, organised by the participants and not for an audience.

The visitor's note

Go if invited. It is loud, cold, extremely long and among the more remarkable things on the continent.

A visitor's note is a heading in this piece; mine is simple. A whole village putting on masks and going into the street is startling to an outsider at first and then familiar — because everybody's part is settled and nobody asks what theirs is. I had not known there was a carnival tradition of this scale still standing in Europe.