Chasing the winter away with doughnuts and a foolish funeral

Carnival is coming to Maribor too! What a perfect opportunity when on a business trip to take your guests of the beaten MICE track and show them some foolish time!

Gorazd Čad

Feb 25, 2019

carnival_pust_cerknica — Photo credit: Slovenian Tourist Board

Carnival, as a Western Christian and Greek Orthodox festival, typically occurs during February or early March, during the period historically known as Shrovetide. Carnival brings the time of public celebrations, parades, street parties, carnival masks, and fooling around, everything combined with elements of a circus. Common features include, among other things, also mocking of authorities, expressions of social satire, costumes of grotesque bodies with exaggerated features such as large noses, bellies, mouths, or elements of animal bodies, and, of course, a general reversal of everyday rules and norms. Traditional Slavic festivals that relate to the period of Carnival take different names. The Slovenian ones are called Pust.

Maribor - Carnival, Pust - mariborinfo.com — Photo credit: Mariborinfo.com/Marko Pigac

PUST IN SLOVENIA

maribor_carnival_pust — Photo credit: Mariborinfo.com/Marko Pigac

The tradition of celebrating Pust is closely related to pagan times when Slovene ancestors believed that by dressing into animals and various mythological beings, they would impact the change of the seasons. Particularly, they wanted the winter to be finally over so that the fertile spring would arrive. Thus, still today the Carnival is promoted as the one that is chasing the winter away, and it reaches its climax on Shrove Tuesday (in other countries also known as Mardi Gras). On that day the festivities wrap up with a dramatic and celebratory ceremony of Pust’s funeral.

PUST IN MARIBOR

KURENTS IN THE OLD VINE HOUSE

maribor_carnival_pust_kurent — Photo credit: Maribor-Pohorje Tourist Board / Tanja Srečkovič

On Saturday, the 2nd of March, Kurents will visit the Old Vine House in Maribor. Kurent is a nowadays carnival figure that was in old times seen as an extravagant god of unrestrained pleasure and hedonism in early Slavic customs.

DID YOU KNOW?

Traditional Slovenian food during the Carnival times are doughnuts filled with apricot marmalade. Doughnuts came to Slovenia in the first half of the 19th Century when Slovenia was a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Supposedly, a famous Viennese chef Cäcilie Krapf invented doughnuts when she, for the first time ever baked a bread dough with an apricot marmalade center in hot butter.

Today, groups of kurents or kurenti wear traditional sheepskin garments while holding wooden clubs and bells, the noise of which is believed to chase the winter away.

OTHER CARNIVAL FESTIVITIES ON SATURDAY, 2nd of March 2019

Ethno Pust in Europark: hang out with the ethno figures from Slavic tradition
Dance and eat in Restaurant Maribor
Traditional Pust in Festival Hall Lent
Traditional Pust in KGB Club
Pust in Steakhouse and Restaurant Rožmarin
Party in MV Pekarna

MAIN DAY – TUESDAY, 5th of March 2019

Square Trg Leona Štuklja: Carnival Fest from 10am all day to the evening: programme for children, concerts, awards for the best masks (individual, group, and family masks), and endless amount of doughnuts (krofi).

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