Winter Solstice Costumes: Europe’s Wild Midwinter Masks

Consider your Halloween costume downgraded. Across a band of Europe that runs from the Atlantic coast of Portugal to the Black Sea, there are villages that spend the darkest weeks of the year handing their streets over to men in fur, horns and bells. The costumes are heavy. The noise is deliberate and enormous. And the job has not changed in centuries: make enough racket, and wear enough terror, to push winter out of town.

These are not Halloween costumes, and they are not folklore staged for tourists, though tourists come now and the villages are glad of them. They are working ritual clothing, usually made by the person who wears it, often inherited. Here are seven of the most extraordinary, what each one is made of, and when you would have to show up to see it.

Kukeri, Bulgaria

The kukeri walk around the new year and again before Lent, in goat and sheep pelts, under carved wooden animal masks that are sometimes built with two faces. Heavy bells hang at the belt. The dancing is not decorative. The sound is the point, and the point of the sound is to frighten off whatever has been gathering in the dark. The same procession is understood to bring a good harvest, health and a decent year to the houses it passes.

The largest gathering is Surva, in Pernik, held on the last weekend of January. It is younger than it looks, founded in 1966 by the choreographer Yordan Nikolov to make Pernik the center of Bulgarian masquerade, and it worked. Recent editions have drawn more than 12,000 participants from across Bulgaria and the Balkans. UNESCO added the tradition to its intangible heritage list in 2015.

Krampus and the Perchten, Austria

Krampus arrives on the evening of 5 December, the night before the feast of Saint Nicholas. He is horned, hooved and hairy, he carries birch rods and chains, and his role in the arrangement is the one Nicholas cannot perform himself. A saint hands out rewards. Somebody else has to handle the punishment.

The figure is older than its Christian framing. Alpine villages ran Perchtenlauf processions long before Krampus acquired a saint to walk beside, and the Church’s attempts to stamp them out never took hold in the high valleys. The suppression was not only medieval either. After the 1932 elections the Dollfuss government banned Krampus outright, and in the 1950s Austrian authorities were still handing out pamphlets titled Krampus Is an Evil Man. The runs continued. They are bigger now than they have been in a century.

Mamuthones and Issohadores, Sardinia

In Mamoiada, in the mountains of central Sardinia, the mamuthones come out for the feast of Sant’Antonio on 16 and 17 January, and again at carnival. The mask is black, carved from alder or wild pear, and its expression is somewhere between suffering and complete indifference. Over a sheepskin mastruca, each man carries about 30 kilos of cowbells strapped to his back.

They move in two parallel rows, slowly, bent under the weight, swinging in unison so the bells land together. Alongside them walk the issohadores in red vests, who throw a rope called sa soha into the crowd to catch a bystander. The captive buys a drink to be released. Watching it, the thing that lands is not the horror of the masks. It is how much the procession resembles a funeral.

Zvončari, Croatia

The bell ringers of the Kastav region walk from village to village on a route their grandfathers walked, in white trousers, striped shirts and sheepskin, with one or more large brass bells at the waist and a club called a balta or bačuka in hand. Some groups wear stylized animal heads. Others wear hats covered in paper flowers, which is somehow more unsettling than the horns.

The stated purpose is the same as everywhere else on this list: scare off the evil spirits of winter and start the spring cycle moving. UNESCO inscribed the pageant in 2009.

Joaldunak, Navarre

Two Basque villages, Ituren and Zubieta, produce the strangest silhouette of the lot. The joaldunak wear sheepskins, lace petticoats, a horsehair whisk in one hand, and a conical hat called a ttuntturro that stands half a metre tall and is finished with ribbons and feathers. Two heavy cowbells hang at the base of the spine.

On the last weekend of January the men of Zubieta walk the three kilometres to Ituren, where the two groups join into one column of forty or fifty. Eighty to a hundred bells, all struck by the same rolling step, is a sound you feel in the chest before you hear it. The joaldunak were said to be protectors of cattle, and the walk is understood to wake the earth for the year ahead.

Caretos de Podence, Portugal

Podence, in the Trás-os-Montes hills of northeastern Portugal, produces the loudest color on this list. The caretos wear suits fringed in red, green and yellow wool, masks of tinplate or leather, and bells at the waist, and they run through the village for three days ending on Shrove Tuesday, when a Shrovetide figure is burned in the afternoon.

The carnival began as a rite of passage for the young men of the village and now includes women and children, a shift UNESCO singled out for praise when it inscribed the festivities in 2019. It is a rare case of a tradition that survived by being willing to change who gets to wear the mask.

Busójárás, Mohács, Hungary

The busós of Mohács wear horned wooden masks, painted and carved to a local pattern, for six days of carnival that end the day before Ash Wednesday. The story the town tells is a good one. During the Ottoman occupation the Šokac people fled into the marshes, and an old man told them to carve masks and wait. A masked rider came for them on a stormy night, they went back into town in costume, and the occupying soldiers, hearing the noise and seeing the faces, decided demons had arrived and left.

The quieter version of the story is the one that matches every other tradition here: the busós are not chasing off an army, they are chasing off winter. UNESCO inscribed it in 2009.

The same costume, over and over

Put the seven side by side and a shared grammar shows up fast. Fur or fleece, so the wearer stops reading as a person. A carved face, usually from a wood that grows locally. Horns, often from an animal the village actually keeps. And bells, always bells, worn at the waist or slung on the back in weights that make walking hard on purpose. Difficulty is part of the offering.

None of these villages coordinated with the others. What they share is the problem: a long dark stretch of year, a community that has to get through it, and a decision to meet it loudly rather than wait it out. It is one of the oldest ideas in visual culture, and it is still happening this January, in villages that would be delighted to see you.

When to go

• 5 December: Krampusnacht, Salzburg and across Austria
• 16 and 17 January: Mamuthones, Mamoiada, Sardinia
• Last weekend of January: Joaldunak, Ituren and Zubieta, Navarre
• Last weekend of January: Surva, Pernik, Bulgaria
• Carnival, ending Shrove Tuesday: Caretos, Podence, Portugal; Busójárás, Mohács, Hungary; zvončari, Kastav, Croatia

The photographer Charles Fréger spent two years and nineteen countries assembling Wilder Mann, still the definitive photographic record of these figures, and worth seeking out in book form. For more on the makers and places we return to, see our reference library, and our guide to the most beautiful places on earth.

Image credits: photographs by Peter Kitanov, Vivian Krayslavova, MatthiasKabel, Gregu61, Vjekoslav Frlan, Jean Michel Etchecolonea, Sunnyorange and Qji, via Wikimedia Commons, used under the CC BY-SA 4.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 and CC BY 2.5 licenses, or in the public domain.

By Moss & Fog Staff