Ivan Kupala

This is the name given in the folk calendar for the July 7 holiday, better known to Orthodox Christians as the feast of John the Baptist. It can also be called Ivanov Den (Ivan’s Day) or Ivan Tsvetnoi (Ivan the Colored). Just like any other Russian holiday, Christian rituals have their origins in pagan ones. In pre-Christian times, it was the feast of the summer solstice and the day of cleansing with water and fire.

The word kupalo means being angry, wild and boiling with rage. The combination of this pagan deity with the Christian holiday of John the Baptist, and the similarity of the words kupalo and kupat (to immerse in water) gave the holiday a hybrid name.

Our pagan ancestors believed that, in the struggle against evil forces (which were to blame for all human failures, bad harvests and disease), they needed rituals of a cleansing and avertive nature, using the most active elements — fire and water. This was why, in the old days, on the night of Ivan Kupala, bonfires were lit on the outskirts of towns and villages. On the one hand, these bonfires were necessary for chasing away evil spirits from homes and farm land. On the other, they were an element of a feast of young people, who danced in rings around the fires and played games. The most dexterous would jump through the fire. Old clothes, bones, tree bark and the clothes of sick people were burnt on them.

Another ritual was cleansing by water. That night, Russian people would go to rivers and lakes to swim, thus removing any filth or evil intrigues from their persons. For many centuries, the braver ones would go in search of ferns, which, according to legend, had special healing properties and were supposed to bring the finder happiness.

People gathered other healing grasses on Ivan Kupala too, and whole villages would often set off to the woods and meadows to gather them, then dry them in their attics and store them in special flax bags so that there was enough grass until next year and so that it didn’t lose its healing power. In old Russian herbals, there is a list of those healing grasses, flowers and roots which should be collected on Kupala night. Those which were picked at dawn, before the dew had a chance to dry on them, were considered particularly good for the health. Sick people and animals were fumigated with them.

There were plenty of superstitions linked to Kupala night, and it was considered  bewitched. Evil spirits were believed to be so strong then that horses were not allowed out to graze in the meadows, calves were kept in the cowsheds with the cows, because  the young could not cope on their own with the demons. Peasants even put burning nettles on the windows of the cowsheds to prevent the evil spirits from getting into the barn where the cattle were kept.

Ivan Kupala  was one of the best loved of Russian folk festivals and often was accompanied by wild orgies. Traditions demanded that houses, churches and even barns be decorated with the branches of young birches, and that everyone, from the very oldest to the very youngest, took part in the rituals of Kupala. It was believed that only collective ritual activity could guarantee the genuine security and well-being of the whole peasant community and every individual peasant. There was an old peasant principle at work here: evil and hardship could only be dealt with by the whole world, collectively.

— Valentina Kolesnikova

Items in Brief

It doesn’t take a great mind to see that the Russian word for the seventh month, like its English counterpart, comes from the great Roman general Julius Caesar. It replaced a whole host of old pagan names like lipets, from the linden (lipa) trees which blossom around this time, and cherven (from the old Russian word for ‘red’ — chervlyony), because of the red and reddish colors of the berries that ripen in July. It was also known as zharnik or stradnik, from the heat (zhara) and frenzied activity of harvest time (strada), grozovik, from the common thunderstorms (grozy) and senozarnik (dawn hay), because of the practice of cutting hay at dawn while it was still wet with dew. Photos from Great Encyclopedia of Russia.

July is an important month for the Romanov family, the second dynasty of Russian tsars. On July 24 1596 Michael, the first of the dynasty, was born to a family of Boyars. At the age of 16, when Russia was still reeling from the Time of Troubles, he was elected tsar by the Zemsky Sobor, who saw him, in spite of his tender years, as the only savior and unifier of the divided country. Though his reign was unremarkable, it provided necessary stability and gave way to increasingly powerful regimes under his son Alexis and grandson Peter the Great. He died on his 49th birthday.

July 6, meanwhile, is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Nicholas I, the third son of Paul and younger brother of Tsar Alexander I, whose sudden death brought Nicholas to the imperial throne  in 1825.

During Nicholas’ reign (1825-1856), personal autocratic power was favored over the rule of law, and the bureaucratic machine was at its strongest. A despotic and cruel emperor, the main demand he made on his subjects was obedience. Almost all state funds were spent on the bureaucratic apparatus and the military. A manic disciplinarian, Nicholas I introduced military order to all Russia’s educational establishments and in July 1826 set up the notorious Third Department, a secret political police force. Many of Russia’s leading public figures, like the poets Pushkin and Lermontov, and liberal thinker Alexander Herzen were subjected to persecution and repression.

Foreign policy under Nicholas focused on strengthening Russia’s southern borders and an attempt to break up the bordering Ottoman Empire. This led to the embarrassment of the Crimean War of 1853-6, defeat in which became the symbol of the collapse of Nicholas’ political system, and, as some historians believe, the cause of his death.

The event which surely set the tone of Nicholas I’s rule was quashing of the ‘Decembrist’ revolt on July 13, 1826, and the execution of five of its leaders (see Russian Life, Dec. 1995). In the 150 years up to 1825 there had been no public execution of nobles in Russia. Still, the revolt – brought on largely by miscommunication about who was to succeed to the throne – did represent a real threat to the monarchy, and, in retrospect, it is not hard to see why the ruler who was to become known as ‘The Gendarme of Europe’ reacted as ruthlessly as he did.

One of Nicholas I’s more talented contemporaries was the artist Alexander Ivanov, born July 28, 1806. He was the author of the famous painting The Appearance of Christ to the People (see sketch from the painting, bottom left), which currently occupies an entire room in Moscow’s newly reopened Tretyakov Gallery. He spent 20 years in Italy working on the painting, during which time he also made more than 10 sketches and 60 studies of its characters. He was strict both with himself and with his work, and very modest, treating his work as a mission to tell mankind of the arrival of God on earth. “Ivanov is a real enigma,” wrote arts patron Sergei Dyagilev. “On the one hand, what Russian person doesn’t know him? On the other, no person actually knows him.”

On a very different note, ethnographer, explorer and thinker Nikolai Miklukho-Maklai (1846-1888) was born 150 years ago on July 5. He was the first Russian scientist to research the aboriginal populations of southeast Asia, Australia and Oceania. He is best known throughout the world for his expedition to New Guinea, whose people  welcomed him with open arms. He spent several years among them, researching their customs, morals and rituals. A lifelong opponent of racism and colonialism, he remains popular on the island. A region in its northeast still bears the name Miklukho-Maklai Coast.