Culture of feasts today. Commemorial rites of national and calendar feasts

Barna, Gábor (2011) Culture of feasts today. Commemorial rites of national and calendar feasts. Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 56 (1). pp. 23-30. ISSN 1216-9803

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Abstract

The traditional ritual year which was characterized by Christian feasts for centuries on one hand, and the cosmological, agrarian (economic), individual, family, and local communal holidays on the other, has been rapidly changing between 1945 and 1956 during the first Socialist/Communist years. A new system of the ritual year was established according to the new ideology and power situation: the so-called Socialist ritual year. It was characterized by international, Soviet and national-communist feasts, refusing the religious holidays. Some softening were introduced only after the 1956 Hungarian revolution. The main Christian feasts were again accepted (Christmas, Easter). This Socialist period with its Socialist feasts lasted for 45 years when in 1989/1990 the legal power system was changed.After the elction in 1990 the totalitarian Socialist ideology with its symbolic holidays has mostly disappeared. New national feasts were created e.g. the memorial day of the 1956 revolution which was a prohibited alternative feast during the Socialist period. Patriotic holidays have regained their importance. The symbols of the feasts have been totally changed. The traditional Christian ritual year has been partly restored, but in a rather secularized society. Christmas, Easter have been commercionalized. Local feasts have emerged which serve first of all the restoration of the civil society and express the local identity.The paper deals with the process of changes in Hungary showing the role of the holidays and the ritual year in society.

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