Bulgarian Rainmaking Rituals
The ethnographic section of Pleven's historical museum contains documentary evidence of many archaic folk practices once common throughout Bulgaria, and now on the verge of disappearing for good. Appropriately enough for a region famous for its long dry summers, pride of place goes to the rainmaking rituals which villagers hoped would bring an end to drought. Foremost among these was the parading of the peperuda , when a young girl (preferably an orphan, and always a virgin) was stripped bare by female helpers, clad in leaves and branches, and then taken round to every household in the village. The helpers would sing songs while the householder emptied a bucket of water over the peperuda , who responded by flapping her arms in imitation of a bird. The party then received a present of flour and beans from the householder before moving on. Later the same day the villagers would emerge with a funeral bier bearing a german - a male doll endowed with an overlarge phallus (often represented by a red pepper). The german was then either buried near a well or thrown in the river. The doll was usually made of clay, although in the Pleven region it had to be fashioned from a broomstick stolen from the house of a pregnant woman. In some areas, the german could only be handled by chaste maidens, and had to spend the night prior to the ritual in the house of the girl chosen to play the peperuda . The symbolic burial of the german seems to echo the fertility rites common to Indo-European peoples in ancient times, when, according to one branch of anthropological opinion, human sacrifices were made to mother earth in order to ensure good harvests.
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