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Dodola and Peperuda

 

In a few eastern and south-eastern areas of the Balkans, especially Bulgaria, the rainmaking rite is still practised, even though vestigially. In other parts of the Balkans, the custom has all but died out, although as late as the 1960’s it was very much alive in parts of Yugoslavia too, and well-documented by camera-toting ethnologists and travellers in Serbia and Vojvodina:

The dodolas [...] are still very much alive in people’s memories [...] whenever there is a drought in summer, the older women wish for the dodolas to appear, firmly believing even today in their magical power to make rain. In the village of Brestać in Srem, the last time dodolas appeared was in 1988.¹

 

 

During a period of spring or summer drought, it was the custom in many Balkan villages for a group of local girls to undress and then put on various combinations of leaves, sprigs, blossoms, flowers and herbs to perform the rainmaking ceremony. Early reports, made mostly if not entirely by male observers, describe these girls as ‘naked’ under their clothing of greenery: although what precise degree of undress this ‘nakedness’ really constituted is a moot point, since none of the commentators is likely to have witnessed the actual disrobing, let alone the training, preparation or rehearsal of the girls for the ceremony – roles which seem to have been reserved exclusively for mature and sometimes elderly women. At any rate, led by an older girl or young woman who had also been dressed or decorated in this way, the girls then went in procession through their village, and stopped in front of houses to perform dances and sing songs, which included formulaic refrains, all the while calling upon the heavens to send down rain. The housewives poured water over the leader of the troupe, and sometimes the girls themselves sprinkled water over the courtyards, using bundles of sprigs and leaves. They were then rewarded by the householders with flour or food and sometimes money.

In some areas, especially Dalmatia, Albania and Northern Greece, boys or youths were involved as performers.

 

The custom – or groups of customs – seems all the more interesting in that, while it flowered predominantly in South-East Europe, ‘typologically comparable’ elements can also be traced much further north, for example among other Slavs, and possibly among Balts, Teutons and Celts. ² Moreover, even in the Balkans it was not confined to any single group. As the Bulgarian ethnologist Mikhail Arnaudov wrote in his survey of Balkan rainmaking ceremonies and songs:

 
    In name as well as in essence, here we do have a pan-Balkan ritual. The resemblances that indicate such a unity are spread through all elements of the dances, beliefs and spells. […] With some small variations, everything here points to a single basic type, known equally among all Balkan peoples.

To pose questions about where the ritual sprang up, or what forms it took elsewhere within the large yet relatively closed cultural and historical area occupied by Balkan people, seems almost inappropriate. Not only are the rudiments lost in the remote past but the . . . equalising influences deprive us of any grounds for firm hypotheses. ³ 

So it seems impossible to trace the ritual’s precise lines of development. Yet, despite Arnaudov’s commendable reticence in ascribing theories of origin, other scholars appear to agree that it was first practised among Slavic (or possibly Balto-Slavic or proto-Slavic) tribes, and then disseminated to other groups. Even so, since there is no archaeological evidence and a complete absence of artefacts of any kind as far as the rainmaking ceremonies themselves are concerned, and since the first written records about them date only from the early 19th century, the best clues available for any kind of historical reconstruction are reports and, more recently, interviews and recordings from travellers, ethnographers and other witnesses and observers, supported by whatever ‘circumstantial evidence’ may be gleaned – or reconstituted – from comparative linguistics and mythology.

 

Even though it is clear that all such reconstructions can only be regarded as tentative, they do offer us some clues which amount to more than pure fancy or guesswork. Various scholars have traced fascinating similarities and correspondences between the Balkan ceremonies and far more ancient religious rituals, so that various tantalisingly appealing, attractive and plausible theories have been put forward, all indicating that the names given to the participants in these Balkan ceremonies are likely to reflect archaic mythological motifs and personages. For example, one group of names for the rain-maiden, of the type Peperuda, probably links with the name of the Slavonic thunder god, Perun, and/or his Baltic equivalent Perkunas; and this may apply to the other names too. ⁴ Comparative linguists and mythologists have also traced further possible connections with myths associated with rain in ancient India, especially via the Rig Veda; not to mention with names of Hittite, Lithuanian, Icelandic, Etruscan, Roman and Greek figures. Some scholars have postulated reconstruction of the origins of the rituals to as far back as the Neolithic period. ⁵

 

Perhaps rather obviously, the customs are readily interpretable as a branch or scion of seasonal fertility rites. Dražen Nožinić writes:

 

The peoples of south east Europe have until recent times known various customs and magical rituals by means of which they have attempted to influence atmospheric phenomena., i.e. to maintain a balance in nature, particularly in times when there was a threat of drought. It is believed that these customs were born in the Neolithic period, and they have been noted in ethnographic literature in various parts of the world. As far as the Balkan Slavs are concerned, it is not hard to differentiate these customs from those which are performed at particular times of the year. Even so, both these categories possess many common features which suggest far more aspects in common than any indications of external similarities to the forms of either type of enactment taken singly. Throughout the literature, the emphasis has been on the similarities between south-Slavic rainmaking customs and the rural customs which belong to the spring-summer cycle. So, on the basis of these facts, the rainmaking customs may be considered as a sub-group within the wider category of customs which aim to ensure fertility. ⁶ 

 

* * *

Despite the enormous and fascinating variations to be found in details of the rainmaking rituals throughout the Balkans (and not just from region to region but sometimes from one village to the next), the underlying unity among them seems incontrovertible. Nor were they confined to one religious group: in Kosovo, as elsewhere, they were practised by both Christians and Moslems. The leading rain-maiden has been variously described as being from a poor and humble family, as a pauper, an orphan, a non-privileged person and as the youngest daughter of a widow who never remarried and was past childbearing age. There is general emphasis on her lowliness, modesty and purity; and she always went barefoot, perhaps to emphasise her humility or, rather, humbleness and, more simply, her direct connection with the soil. In this way, it might be said, she was ‘earthed’.

 

In many areas, the role passed gradually to the Romanies, till they took it up exclusively. In certain areas, to be a rain-maiden even became a seasonal profession for Romany girls and young women, which involved them in travelling around to perform the ceremonies for various village-communities. It is unclear whether they confined themselves to areas in which their families regularly moved, or went further afield. Far more detailed work needs to be done, and done quickly, in researching the role of gypsies in carrying on the tradition. It may soon be altogether too late to discover anything at all about this.

 

The custom diminished in scale and importance throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, partly because of official disapproval and at times outright censorship, first on the part of the church and later by communist authorities, both of whose proponents and administrators deemed such practices improper, immoral, primitive or degenerate. Rulers, it seems, tend to be prudes regardless of their ideologies.

 

* * *

So far as I have been able to discover, the first person ever to report, document and transcribe the rainmaking songs and ceremonies was the Serbian collector, language reformer, dictionary-compiler and translator, Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787-1864). He included an entry on ‘Dodola’ in the first edition of his Srpski Rječnik (Serbian Dictionary), published in Vienna in 1815. Through subsequent editions of the Dictionary (1857), the first volume of his collection Srpske narodne pjesme (Folk Songs of the Serbian People, 1841) and his posthumously published study Život i običaji naroda srpskoga (Life and Customs of the Serbian People, 1867), the rainmaking customs and songs became well-known to such internationally renowned poets and scholars as Goethe – whom Karadžić actually met.

 

While Karadžić consistently uses the word djevojke (‘girls’), an English traveller to Serbia in the 1840’s, Alexander Paton, took pains to point out that the leading participant was by no means a mere-slip-of-a-girl:

 

One of the most extraordinary customs of Servia is that of the Dodola. When a long drought has taken place, a handsome young woman is stripped, and so dressed up with grass, flowers, cabbage and other leaves, that her face is scarcely visible; she then, in company with several girls of twelve to fifteen years of age, goes from house to house singing a song, the burden of which is a wish for rain. It is then the custom of the mistress of the house at which the Dodola is stopped to throw a little water on her. ⁷

Following Karadžić, Paton adds, “This custom used also to be kept up in the Servian districts of Hungary, but has been forbidden by the priests.”

 

The Serbian writer Dimitrije Nikolajević told me, in Belgrade in October 2000, that in his childhood, in rural areas near Kragujevac, villagers deliberately set out to choose “the most beautiful girls, aged sixteen or seventeen, for the roles of dodolas.” Another Serbian writer, Mila Bosić, says that in the village of Banatske Here in Vojvodina, “the dodola, who was a gypsy, had to be pregnant." ⁸ Dražen Nožinić, a particularly thorough researcher, writes:

 

This work is based on the results of the author’s own fieldwork between 1989 and 1991 in two hundred and ninety villages in Kordun, Banija and Moslavina as well as in the surrounding areas [. . .] The period of time for which the details were collected covers approximately one hundred years (1870–1970). Thus all the informants interviewed during the course of this research had actually already participated actively in the customs discussed [. . .] A few of them were born towards the end of the 19^th century, and the majority at the beginning of the 20^th century. The youngest were born in the 1920’s. The performers were trained and taught by older women, born some 45 to 50 years before the performers themselves. These older women thus transferred their knowledge of traditions in which they themselves had participated. These facts about invoking rain take us back to the last quarter of the 19^th century. Moreover, certain rites could be and were permitted to be performed only by elderly women, and in this context the ‘teachers’ appear in a different role, i.e. the informants had themselves participated throughout the whole of their lives in various rites to summon rain. Their fellow villagers, whom they had taught, went on performing these rites right up to the 1980’s, when most of the rituals were eventually given up. ⁹

 

This passage not only provides insights into the survival of the rite and the ages of participants but implies that, in many villages, ‘inner’ knowledge of rainmaking rituals was an integral part of female ‘magical’ lore, and passed on either in matrilineal fashion or at least solely among women. It is a pity that we have no authoritative reports by female ethnographers who have been allowed in on these preparatory rituals. It is tempting to interpret Nožinić’s information in terms of a genuine ‘mystery’ and, what is more, to perceive the rite as a descendant of far more ancient female fertility ceremonies. ¹⁰

 

* * *

 
On the age of participants, then, there exists considerable difference of opinion, which certainly reflects a wide variety of divergent practices. Some commentators say that the ages of the girls gradually diminished from between around eleven and sixteen to between five and ten years; and others, usually envisioning or interpreting the ceremony in terms of a specific rite de passage from childhood to readiness for sexual activity, argue that crucial criteria for the selection of the rain-maiden were prepubescence, and/or virginity/chastity.

 

While these are certainly oversimplifications which in any case do not fit all the facts, there is little doubt that a specifically ‘childlike naivety’  does appear through all the recorded rain-maiden’s songs, which are recognisably distinct in tone from other genres of folksongs performed by adults in the same geographical areas. It seems at least possible, then, that the rites had always involved young girls, at least as members of the leading rain-maiden’s troupe, in much the same way as they may well have done in Minoan and Mycenaean religious ceremonies. ¹¹It is also apparent that the rain-maiden’s intimate association with the pouring of fresh water in itself provides the clearest possible indication of her ‘purity’. ¹² Whatever her age, the key factor is not only that she ‘stands on a threshold’, but that she herself represents or embodies it. As the Bulgarian anthropologist Florentina Badalanova pointed out to me in London in 2000, in every respect her necessary condition is ‘liminal’.

 

* * *

 

 

A soul cake, a soul cake, a soul cake,

Please, Good Missus, a soul cake –

 

An apple, a pear, a plum or a cherry,

Any good thing to make us all merry –

 

One for Peter, two for Paul,

And three for Him who made us all.

 

This chant may be compared with some lines in a Dalmatian rainmaking song, sung by boys, youths and unmarried bachelors, quoted by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić: ¹⁴

 

Grant us, mistress,

An oke of flour, mistress,

A fleecelet of wool, mistress,

A portion of cheese, mistress,

A handful of salt, mistress,

Two or three eggs, mistress,

God be with you, mistress,

For you have bestowed gifts upon us.