At Christmas, as a year-end reckoning, we give thanks to the Creator for keeping us healthy - said singer and storyteller István Sebestyén, with whom Vasárnap talked about the Christmas customs of the Szeklers of Bukovina.
- As far as I know, the Szeklers of Bukovina prepared with special care to celebrate Christmas. Was it really like that?
- Perhaps it is not an exaggeration to say that in the Carpathian Basin, we, the Szeklers of Bukovina, have mostly preserved the unity of the winter holidays and Christmas. Advent, the preparation for the birth of Jesus Christ, was always very deep and colorful among the Székely people of Bukovina. Many of us were brothers, I remember in the evenings we used to sing Christmas carols all the time.
Our father told us a lot about the birth of Baby Jesus and Christmas customs, and my mother - who was a woman with a beautiful voice - sang from the heart.
This is how the evenings passed during Advent. I can say that both of them were speakers from whom you could learn a lot. We didn't feel it at the time, but we were lucky, since we already absorbed the folk spiritual culture with the "mother's milk", which is now completely worn out and can only be known in the framework of "attractions" confined to the stage.
– But were these traditions still alive in your childhood?
"Partly yes." In the 1950s and early 1960s, no one in Kakasdon was wealthy. And where there is deprivation - no TV, no radio - there the traditions continue to survive. The Szeklers resettled in Tolna county lived almost the same as they once did in Bukovina.
They tried to keep the customs and traditions that characterized them before.
The constancy of the holidays also made foreignness feel like home for them. At that time, the kaláka was still a living custom. And where one or two Székely people got together, there was also room for notaszó and fairy tales. This is the reason why we have remained in the tradition of our ancestors.
– Is that why you started performing folk songs and fairy tales later, as an adult?
- Yes, later the Good Lord somehow adjusted it in such a way that it led me on such a path that I noticed that the tradition of our elders is really valuable. I left my previous job and chose performance art that feeds on Székely folklore. Now I can knead, I can shape the songs and songs of our ancestors, those that I once could have died while still alive. My CD, Serkenj lelkem, related to the Christmas holiday circuit, was published, in which I tried to pass on something of the treasures that I inherited.
The full interview can be read HERE!
