NEW YORK FOLKLORE QUARTERLY
Vol. III, No. 3, Autumn 1947

PUBLICATIONS | VOICES | BACK  ISSUES | FOLKLORE  IN ARCHIVES | FOLK  ARTISTS  SELF-MGT | ORDER PUBLICATIONS | SEARCH

SLOVAK WEDDING CUSTOMS
Alvena V. Seckar

ONE of my earliest recollections as a child is of a bewildering, rollicking experience as a flower girl at a typical Slovak wedding in McMechen, West Virginia. This is a town which consists of a cluster of miners’ homes and the Hitchman Coal Mine, next to which I was born. My mother, when still in her teens, had emigrated from the little town of Novoty, near the Polish border in the Arve province of Slovakia; my father came from somewhere near Bratislava. They met in Pittsburgh, where my mother was working, and where my father was enjoying a brief holiday from the Hitchman Coal Mine.

The “camp,” as the compound of “company” houses around the coal mine is called, housed little clusters of people from various Slavic countries—from Czechoslovakia (at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), Poland, Yugoslavia, and many others.

Although there were many occasions at which people got together, there was no other that reached the joyousness and conviviality of a wedding. The ceremony was an excuse for continuous festivities which began as soon as the men came home from the pits on a Friday evening and went on until Monday dawn in a whirl of dancing, singing, and eating that led to complete inebriation and exhaustion.

In the Old Country, every village was attuned to elaborate celebrations that sometimes lasted as much as ten days. In the New World, economic and social conditions did not permit such long-lasting affairs, but whatever their duration, the celebrations reflected the ardor and zeal associated with those in the Old World.

In my mother’s town in Slovakia, in Novoty, preparations for a wedding were started months in advance with public pronouncements of the impending marriage. Excitement ran high and reached its first climax with the official invitation of the guests. A band of musicians, usually playing accordions, together with four of the eight druzice or bridesmaids, and four of the eight druzbas (this is supposed to be the correct word, although my mother referred to them as druzbundy), or best men, went very formally from house to house in the village (or villages) to invite the guests. They were all dressed in their most lavish costumes: the men elegant in embroidered trousers, short jackets, and tall feathers extending from their embroidered caps; the women beautiful in short, starched, full skirts (puffed out by voluminous petticoats), exquisitely embroidered jackets with full, elbowlength, puffed sleeves, and “portas” (flowered head-wreaths from which hung whirls of varicolored ribbons, and which were worn only by maidens)...

HOME | ABOUT NYFS | PROGRAMS & SERVICES | MUSIC | PUBLICATIONS | RESOURCES | CALENDAR | WHAT’S FOLKLORE? | MEMBERSHIP | GALLERY | SHOP | SEARCH | CONTACT US