Home · Legends & Customs · The Twelve Nights: what walks between Christmas and Boboteaza
On 30 November a door opens in the Carpathians. Between Christmas and Boboteaza it stands at its widest, and on 6 January it closes again — with a cross thrown into running water.
In Romanian folk belief the stretch between 25 December and 6 January does not count as an ordinary week with something attached. It counts as a calendar of its own: twelve days standing for the twelve months of the year to come. Whoever can read them knows what is coming.
The old year has already died by then and the new one is not yet in order. Between the two lies a phase the ethnographic literature describes as chaos — not a misfortune but a necessary state, the one time out of which time itself is made again.
In practice: for a fortnight other rules apply, and everything that is usually kept outside has been let in.
These weeks do not stand alone. They are the height of a season that begins on a date: on St Andrew's Eve the strigoi begin to walk, and in many districts their freedom ends precisely at Epiphany.
So the twelve nights are not the beginning of anything. They are the middle. What went out on 29 November has been abroad for five weeks by now — and on 6 January it is called back in.
The records do not name only the strigoi for these days. They speak of the duhuri ale morților, the spirits of the dead, and of strigoi and moroi, and of the harmful creatures one does not want in the house.
On Christmas Eve at midnight, tradition holds, water turns to wine and the animals in the byre begin to speak.
It is worth pausing before finding that charming. A farmer whose stock stands in the next building is said to lie there listening to his oxen talking — about him. The tradition does not recommend it. It only says that it happens.
That is the basic shape of all twelve days: the order the year normally runs on is suspended, and what is usually mute has a voice.
What the garlic cross is to St Andrew's Eve, the masks are to these days.
The masked processions go through the villages: the capra, the goat, standing for the fertility of the ground; the urs, the bear; the hâzi or urâți, the ugly ones. And the moși — the old ones. The ethnographic reading of them is blunt: the moși are the spirits of the dead, come home to sit down at table with their descendants.
That is exactly what sets these days apart from everything else on this site. At the wake and at the garlic cross, the dead are kept out. In the twelve nights they are invited in, fed, and paid in wine and coin.
Not because they are suddenly less feared. Because they are coming anyway — and a guest you have fed behaves better than one you have shut out.
The prohibitions are the same as on St Andrew's Eve, and they are listed with the same matter-of-factness:
Give nothing out of the house. Do not quarrel, not even in jest — do it and you carry the bruises through the year. Do not strike, neither with the fist nor with the flat of the hand. Do not sift flour. On Christmas Day itself, do not sweep.
The prohibitions all have one shape. They forbid the giving out, the sweeping out and the handing over — for twelve days the house stops acting on the world outside it.
On 6 January the door is shut again, and it is shut with water.
The priest blesses the water — the agheasmă mare, the great holy water, which is said to keep for a year without spoiling. He carries the cross through the village; in some districts that procession is called Chiraleisa, from the Greek Kyrie eleison. Houses, yards and livestock are sprinkled.
And then a wooden cross is thrown into the river. Young men go in after it. Whoever brings it out counts as free of all guilt for the coming year.
After that the water counts as blessed — all water. So no laundry is washed that day. Nor is there quarrelling, nor lending, nor borrowing of money. The same prohibitions as at the start of the season, one last time.
The end of the twelve days is an oracle night too. Unmarried girls put basil, busuioc, under the pillow to dream of the man they will marry.
And whoever slips on the ice and falls at Boboteaza marries within the year. It is one of the few predictions of these days you need not wish for — you need only stumble.
In the Carpathian Chronicles winter has a chapter of its own, and it does not stand by accident just before the one where the curse on the three families begins. “Summer is the village's mask. Winter is its face,” says “The Village of the Hanged”. What it describes is a place that looks empty six months of the year — and that fills up again in exactly these twelve days: between the years, when the people who work abroad come home and the village plays at being alive for a few weeks.
That is the same week in which the moși masks go through the lanes and the dead are asked to the table. In the book it is the living who return from abroad and fill the standing-empty houses for a few days. Both have the same shape: once a year the village is complete, and afterwards it is empty again.
The narrator traces the rules these pages are about back to winter itself — to sixteen hours of blackness over a village with no streetlamps: that you are home after dark, that the oil lamp burns before the icon, that you answer no call in the dark. He closes the chapter with a sentence that explains why these twelve days are not folklore but order: he learned the rules in summer and took them for superstition — and after a single winter there he began to keep them. The rest is in the Carpathian Chronicles.
The reading of the twelve days as the span between chaos and the cleansing by blessed water, the masked processions and the moși as the returning dead are documented in Romanian ethnography; the belief that on Christmas night water turns to wine and the animals speak is recorded in the collections of folk belief. The Boboteaza rites — the blessing of the waters, the Chiraleisa procession, the cross in the river — are living practice, not only tradition.
That German-speaking countries call this window the Rauhnächte is a transfer, not a translation: the span is the same, the customs are not.
Between 25 December and 6 January, the day of Boboteaza. Twelve days which in folk belief stand for the twelve months of the coming year.
The span is the same, the customs are different. What sets the Romanian tradition apart is above all its ending: the season closes with the blessing of the waters at Boboteaza and the cross thrown into the river.
Because the dead are abroad in these days in any case. The moși masks represent the returning ancestors sitting down at table with their descendants — they are fed rather than shut out.
In many districts it is the day their licence to walk runs out. It begins on St Andrew's Eve, 30 November; Epiphany is the other end of the same season.
The great holy water blessed at Boboteaza. It is said to keep for a year without spoiling and is used to bless house, yard and livestock.
The night of 30 November: a garlic cross on the window — and stories told until cockcrow.
The undead of the Carpathians — the root of the vampire myth.
Why the dead can never be left alone on the first night.
Corben Vale's Carpathian Chronicles tell exactly these kinds of stories – based on true events. “The Village of the Hanged” and “Stafii” are out in seven languages.
Subscribing to the newsletter comes with the free PDF “Thirteen True Customs of the Carpathians”.