Скачать или смотреть Babari 2026 | Vasilica in the Bair, Bitola | 13 January | PART 1

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This video captures the opening of Vasilica, the traditional winter ritual celebrated on 13 and 14 January in Bair, a Romani neighborhood in Bitola, North Macedonia.

At the center of the ritual stands the Bride, a man dressed as a woman, a liminal figure who channels the entire ritual through continuous dance and movement, embodying the New Year itself — renewal, fertility, and transition.

Here, we see both the Bride and the Babari preparing. The Babari dress in animal skins (mostly goats), wear bells and masks, and carry sticks or wooden weapons. These masked guardians resemble Kukeri, Didi, Busójárás, Krampus and others across the region, pointing to a shared Balkan ritual language.

The goat skins carry additional significance: the ritual occurs during the period following the winter solstice, when the sun enters Capricorn (the Goat). This period symbolizes endurance, survival, and the gradual return of light, likely reinforcing the symbolic power of the Babari’s appearance.

The Bride and Babari prepare to move through the neighborhood, beginning a ritual that combines movement, noise, and embodied transformation. The power of Vasilica is generated in these first moments, before the procession begins.


Historical context:

Vasilica is a winter ritual with millennia-old roots, originally a pagan celebration of renewal, protection, and the turning of the seasons, now integrated with the Christian feast of Saint Basil (Old New Year). It is part of a wider Balkan and European tradition of masked winter rituals, where masked and costumed figures, often in animal skins, create noise, movement, and chaos to protect the community, drive away evil, and channel seasonal energy. These rituals are living, embodied traditions, performed through dance, noise, and physical presence rather than words, and they have been passed down orally for generations.

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