There’s no Mardi Gras or Carnival in Russia. Lent doesn’t descend on Orthodox Christians in one big swoop as in Catholicism, but in a series of events with increasingly strict regulations.
Two weeks later, Meatfare Sunday marks the last day Orthodox Christians can eat meat until after Easter, aka Pascha.
The Sunday after Meatfare is Cheesefare Sunday, the last day for eating dairy products.
In Catholic communities the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday is sometimes called Pancake Day, while in Orthodox Russia the whole week before Lent is known as Maslenitsa (Butter Week) or Blini Week (Pancake Week). [Blini has the same root as ‘blintz’.] During Pancake Week Russians empty their pantry of milk, eggs, butter, and other Lent no-no’s, by throwing them into a bowl and mixing them to make pancakes. Russian pancakes are closer to what we would call crepes.
Maslenitsa, by Boris Kustodiev, 1919
The late-Februay/early-March celebration combines Christian theology with an ancient pagan tradition of welcoming the spring.
Maslenitsa comes to a close with Vespers on the evening of Cheesefare Sunday.
In Orthodox communities this is also known as Forgiveness Sunday. During the evening ceremonies church-goers face and verbally forgive one another for anything the year before.
The Orthodox Great Lent begins on a Monday rather than a Wednesday, and is called Clean Monday.
Rarely has so much joy emanated from such a small dot on the globe, and reverberated with as much noise as Carnival.
Trinidad and Tobago is the 172nd smallest country in the world, but per capita, it’s party spot #1.
In the 1770s Trinidad had only a few thousand inhabitants, mostly Amerindians; it was one of the most underpopulated regions of Spain’s New World colonies. Spain opened immigration up to French colonists in the West Indies, who were somewhat miffed at the British takeover of the Caribbean. And to sweeten the deal, Spain included land grants for these emigrants and their slaves–provided they were Catholic and swore allegiance to the Spanish King. By the time the British took over the island in 1798—ending 300 years of Spanish rule—the French plantocracy was the dominant group. The island boasted sizable populations of West Africans, Spanish, and Amerindians as well, and was home to pirates, planters, slaves and soldiers alike.
The French celebrated fetes champêtre (garden parties) and bals masque (masquerade balls), borrowing some traditions from their homeland and picking others from the seemingly exotic rituals of their slaves. One highlights of these festivities was a canboulay ceremony, in which “landowners dressed up as negres jardins (garden slaves) and imitated the processions that occurred whenever a sugar cane field caught fire.” (NY Times, Dec. 28, 1986)
As a possession of the United Kingdom, slavery was outlawed in 1833 with the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act. Now it was the former slaves’ time to celebrate, and that they did, openly celebrating West African rhythms and rituals and mixing them with those of their former owners.
Grisso notes that the Carnival bears resemblance to the African Egungun festival, where families dressed in colors, in bands, to honor their ancestors. And while most European festivals transpired indoors, African communities celebrated in the great wide open. Grisso theorizes that the true origin of Carnival may have been the ancient Egyptian festivals, like the one Herodotus describes, in honor of the god Artemis…
Every baris [barge] carrying them there overflows with people, a huge crowd of them, men and women together. Some of the women have clappers, while some of the men have pipes which they play throughout their voyage. The rest of the men and women sign and clap their hands. When in the course of their journey they reach a community–not the city of their destination, but somewhere else–they steer the bareis close to the bank. Some of the women carry on doing what I have already described them as doing, but others shout out scornful remarks to the women in the town, or dance, or stand and pull up their clothes to expose themselves…more wine is consumed during this festival than throughout the whole of the rest of the year. According to the local inhabitants, up to 700,000 men and women, excluding children, come together for the festival.
Herodotus states, “the Egyptians were the first people in the world to hold general festive assemblies, and religious processions and parades, and the Greeks learnt from the Egyptians.”
The tradition was imported by the Romans, and through Rome to France. And it may be the Carnival of Trinidad was the reuniting of the Carnival traditions, filtered through two cultures on two separate continents over two-thousand years, and then merged together for the first time on a tiny island called Trinidad.
Carnival, Port of Spain, Trinidad
However, the British were not quite the party people that the French were. They banned the use of drums, fearing its pounding resulted in non-Victorian outcomes. The inhabitants merely used their creativity and banged on other objects, such as tins. Today the steel drum is universally recognized as a defining symbol of the Caribbean and of Carnivals world-wide.
Eventually the spirit of Carnival migrated eastward. London’s Notting Hill Carnival is the largest public event in the British capitol.
Give it up to Shiva today. The new moon of Phalgun (that’s today) is known as Maha Shivaratri in the Hindu religion. To the adherents of Shaivism, who worship Shiva as their primary god, today is the holiest day of the year.
Shiva gets a misleading rap as The Destroyer. It sounds cool and daunting, but is only half accurate. Being the Destroyer, Shiva is also the agent of transformation and dissolution that makes recreation possible.
Shiva’s often pictured as blue. One time Indra was trying to regain his wealth and prosperity—taken by an angry sage. Brahma suggested churning the Ocean of Milk to create the “Nectar of Immortality.” But during the churning of the Ocean, a great poison called Halahala was released, deadly to all living things upon the earth. Shiva was summoned to save the world by drinking the Halahala. He wasn’t killed, but his throat became permanently blue.
Shiva is one part of the Hindu triumvirate. The other two parts are Brahma, the creator of the universe, and Vishnu, the preserver of it.
Today is considered by many to be the day Shiva married Parvati.
Shiva & Parvati
Shiva is at times ascetic, at others hedonistic. When Shiva was in one of his ascetic moods, Parvati tried seducing him but with little luck. The god of desire, Kama, was sent in on Parvati’s behalf to lure Shiva from his asceticism and ignite his more lustful side. Kama used the sounds and scents of spring at her disposal. It worked, but Shiva repaid Kama by burning him to ashes with his middle eye. [Caveat Matchmaker!] Shiva and Parvati were later married in a grand celebration. Kama was resurrected when Shiva embraced Parvati, and the sweat from her body mixed with Kama’s ashes.
According to legend, “their lovemaking is so intense that it shakes the cosmos, and the gods become frightened. They are frightened at the prospect of what a child will be like from the union of two such potent deities.”
The couple have a child named Ganesha, pictured with the trunk of an elephant. The three are often pictured together. Shiva and Parvati reflect the perfect balance of the universe. Parvati represents harmony in nature and the power to create and nourish.
“A federal statute officially designates the holiday as ‘Washington’s Birthday,’ reflecting the desire of Congress specially to honor the first president of the United States.” — 5 U.S. Code, Section 6103
The United States government honors three individuals’ birthdays with their own federal holiday. Who are they?
George Washington (3rd Monday in February)
Martin Luther King, Jr (3rd Monday in January)
and Jesus Christ (Christmas, December 25th).
Yes, the picture above was just to fool you. Lincoln didn’t make the cut. [And Columbus Day remembers the date Columbus landed in North America, not Columbus’s birthday.]
The third Monday in February is official Washington’s Birthday Observed, not Presidents’ Day. The confusion came in 1968 with the Uniform Monday Holiday Bill, in which the federal government moved Washington’s Birthday from February 22 to the third Monday in February…
…even though the third Monday in February can never fall on February 22.
The first year the Uniform Monday Holiday Act took effect was 1971. That year “Washington’s Birthday” holiday fell on February 15, closer to Lincoln’s Birthday (February 12) than Washington’s. Henceforth, many states, cities and companies which formerly recognized Lincoln’s Birthday on a local level decided to forego it in favor of a joint “Presidents’ Day” honoring both.
On the national level, “During the 1998 restyling of the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure, references to ‘Washington’s Birthday’ were mistakenly changed to ‘Presidents’ Day,'” according to the U.S. Code.
So that year Congress reiterated that:
“A federal statute officially designates the holiday as ‘Washington’s Birthday,’ reflecting the desire of Congress specially to honor the first president of the United States.” — 5 U.S. Code, Section 6103
Is George Washington miffed about sharing his birthday with another Prez? Or about it never being celebrated on his actual birthday?
It’s all a moot point, because George Washington was not born on February 22.
Nope. Despite the fact that the country has celebrated February 22 as Washington’s Birthday since the end of the 19th century, George was in fact born on February 11.
In 1752, when George was 20, Britain and all its colonies transfered from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, as much of the rest of Europe had already done.
Part of the switch entailed a one-time chucking of 11 days from the calendar, in order to make up for 11 extra leap days that had piled up over the past 15 or so centuries.
Washington chose to recognize the Gregorian equivalent of his birthday, February 22, instead of February 11, as his legal birthday, just as the anniversaries of many pre-1752 dates had to be adjusted 11 days to reflect the new reality. [Yeah, Y2K had nothing on Y1752.]
Personally, I think we should go back to George’s Julian birthday and celebrate his birthday and Lincoln’s on February 11th and 12th. That’s right, a four-day weekend for the hard-working American people.
My friend who’s a Congressional aide tells me another holiday will never fly at the Capitol. But if countries like Germany and Australia can give workers 6 weeks off for vacation, I think each of our two greatest Presidents deserves a little celebration of their own…
Legal Holidays of the United State of America
5 USC Sec. 6103. Holidays
-STATUTE-
(a) The following are legal public holidays:
New Year's Day, January 1.
Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., the third Monday in
January.
Washington's Birthday, the third Monday in February.
Memorial Day, the last Monday in May.
Independence Day, July 4.
Labor Day, the first Monday in September.
Columbus Day, the second Monday in October.
Veterans Day, November 11.
Thanksgiving Day, the fourth Thursday in November.
Christmas Day, December 25.
Turkmenistan’s Flag Day was established in 1997 to coincide with the birthday of then-President Saparmurat Niyazov (1940-2006).
Niyazov ruled the country for over twenty years. He became Secretary of the Turkmen Communist Party (ie. Head Honcho) in 1985 and remained in power after Turkmenistan declared its independence in October 1991.
Turkmenistan prefers stability to change. One of the last of the Soviet Republics to formerly break from Russia, the country remained a one-party Communist state with party leader Niyazov as its President. In 1994 his term was extended to ten years by a vote of the Mejlis, the parliament which he controlled. Before the term was set to expire, a newly ‘elected’ Mejlis, consisting of members groomed by Niyazov, benevolently heaped a new title on their leader: “President for Life.”
Highlights of the Niyazov administration include:
Bestowed title upon himself: “Serdar Turkmenbashi.” (Great Leader of all Turkmen.)
Renamed the month of April after his mother.
Renamed January after himself: Turkmenbashi
Wrote the “Ruhnama,” a guide of his views on spiritual living–required reading for all schoolchildren.
Named airports, streets and landmarks after himself.
During his reign posters and statues of him were put up on almost every block in the country.
According to a segment from 60 Minutes (aired January 2004):
“He’s not only a brutal dictator, but a dictator who runs his country like it’s his own private Disney World…His face is everywhere, and you can’t walk a block without seeing either a statue or photo of him.”
Said the humble Great Leader in response:
“I’m personally against seeing my pictures and statues in the streets—but it’s what the people want.”
And as for renaming months after himself and his family, he explained:
“You can’t have a great country without great ancestors—and we had none before. We’re starting new, with a new society, and this new culture will be followed for centuries.”
In defense of his authoritative rule, he explained it from the Turkmenistan perspective:
“You Americans, you should understand one thing—for 74 years under the Soviets we were prohibited from thinking about political opposition parties. Look at America—you had a civil war, you didn’t have instant democracy. Yet now you demand we create democracy in Turkmenistan overnight.
Niyazov died in 2006 without an apparent successor.
International Crisis Group noted, “His two decades in power bequeathed ruined education and public health sectors, a record of human rights abuses, thousands of political prisoners and an economy under strain despite rich energy exports.”
“For his 63rd birthday, [2003] Niyazov’s ministers proclaimed him God’s prophet on Earth. This year, [2008] according to a law passed last week, Flag Day – a holiday typically observed in conjunction with Niyazov’s birthday – will be celebrated exclusively.”
Though his legacy has begun to fade, Turkmenistan still celebrates Flag Day today, February 19, on what would have been the Turkmenbashi’s 69th birthday.
Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a man-child was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte.
So begins Alex Haley’s classic Roots: the Saga of an American Family. The book and subsequent mini-series reawakened the American consciousness to the history of slavery and the black experience in America.
It’s actually The Gambia, not Gambia.
Inclusion of the article “The” in the Gambia’s case is because the country is essentially a tiny sliver of land drilled into the west coast of Senegal. It’s made up of the land that hugs the Gambia River as it winds to the Atlantic.
In Roots, Kunta Kinte is captured in The Gambia, transported on a slave ship and sold into slavery in Maryland.
That Haley can trace his ancestral line to what is now Africa’s smallest country (At 10,000 square kilometers, The Gambia is smaller than Connecticut) is not unusual. According to Wikipedia:
As many as 3 million slaves may have been taken from the [Senegambia] region during the three centuries that the transatlantic slave trade operated.
If accurate, that would mean thirty Africans were abducted from Senegambia a day, every day, for three hundred years.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the first American President to visit Africa when he spent the night in The Gambia en route to the Casablanca Conference in 1943.
The Gambia achieved independence from Great Britain on February 18, 1965.
For the first 15 years of its independence The Gambia enjoyed its reputation as a model multi-party democracy for African nations. An unsuccessful but bloody attempted coup in 1981 dented that reputation. The country’s President Dawda Jawara was in England attending the marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana when his government was nearly ousted from power. He maintained control via an agreement with Senegal to back his government with military force.
A second coup, in July 1994 was successful, ending Jawara’s near 30-year reign. The head lieutenant of the coup and Gambia’s future leader, Yahya Jammeh, had not been born when Jawara first became Prime Minister.
The Nepalese flag, the only non-rectangular national flag in the world, symbolizes the two religions of Nepal---Buddhism and Hinduism---and the peaks of the Himalayas.
For most of the half-century or so since Democracy Day was established in Nepal, the actual practice of democracy has been stifled or totally repressed.
Ironically, Democracy Day marks the return to power of a monarch, King Tribhuvan, in the early 1950s. The country had been run by a succession of despots known as the Rana dictatorship. For generations the Rana allowed the monarchy to remain but used the king as a puppet. In 1950 the pro-democratic King Tribhuvan fled the country with most of his family to India. The Rana declared the king’s 3 year-old great-nephew Gyanendra as the new king, as he was the most senior member of the family left in the country.
For whatever reason foreign powers refused to recognize the new king, and Tribhuvan, with support from India was able to topple the Rana rule.
Soon after, Tribhuvan’s son increased the monarch’s power, virtually taking over Parliament. The power of the monarch waxed and waned over the next half century.
In 2001 the Crown Prince Dipendra went on a shooting rampage, killing the entire royal family and then himself. Gyanendra, the former 3 year-old monarch, was once again the most senior member of the royal family left in the country. He reclaimed the throne, now at age 53.
On Democracy Day in 2004 King Gyanendra encouraged all Nepalese “to unite for making multiparty democracy meaningful through people-oriented politics.” (Democracy Day in Nepal)
The next year King Gyanendra celebrated Democracy Day by dissolving Parliament and seizing control of the entire country, ostensibly to curb Communist factions. (BBC)
The Parliament regained control in 2007 and voted to abolish the monarchy once and for all. King Gyanendra’s reign, and the two and a half century old monarchy, is set to end in April this year [2008] after national elections are held.
Although it’s not all that happy. The newborn nation is still in the throes of economic devastation and ethnic violence. Nor do we know yet if February 17 will continue to be celebrated as the young nation’s independence holiday. Or for that matter, if Kosovo actually is independent.
The State Assembly in Kosovo’s capitol of Pristina declared its independence from Serbia on February 17, 2008. Since that time over 50 countries have recognized the world’s youngest nation’s independence. However, Serbia is not one of those countries.
According to Serbian President Boris Tadic, February 17 is “just a date when an illegal act was enacted, when Pristina proclaimed Kosovo a so-called state.”
Tensions between the ethnic groups that make up the Balkans and the former Republic of Yugoslavia were subdued under the leadership of Josip Tito, who ruled the amalgamation of states for over 30 years after World War II. The states that made up Yugoslavia were: Bosnia and Herzegovenia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia, of which Kosovo was an autonomous province. Tito’s government stressed “Unity in Brotherhood”, the idea that Yugoslavia’s people were essentially one, but had been divided by foreign occupiers over previous generations.
That idea didn’t fly after Tito’s death in 1980. Ethnic nationalism rose and in 1991 and 1992, most states seceded from Yugoslavia (literally, “South Slavs” land) leaving Serbia and Montenegro the sole members of the former republic.
Smaller than Connecticut, Kosovo is home to over 2 million people, 90% of them ethnic Albanians, with the remainder mostly Serbs. Kosovo first declared independence in 1991, but the movement was put down by Serbian leaders like Slobodan Milosevic.
War ravaged the Balkans throughout the 1990s. The Kosovo War of 1998-1999 left between 5,000 and 10,000 people dead, and culminated with the controversial NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The state was governed by the UN between 1999 and 2008.
…what Milosevic and his regime tried to do for the Serbian people during their time could not be more wrong. I mean you do not just dispose of people as they thought they could do. You do not fire people en masse, you do not take their housing rights, you do not ignore 2 million people as if they did not exist, and most of all you do not run them away from their homes and their property.
On the other hand what that regime did was not new to Kosovo at all, it had all been done before by the Albanian side…between 1974 and 1988. And let me tell you, it was not easy to be anything but Albanian during those years in Kosovo.
…Having said all of this I can say the place is cursed and will never be peaceful.
