Sunday Pankukas

Natalija, who runs the USA Information Center in Daugavpils for the U.S. Embassy in Riga invited me over on Sunday for pankūkas ("pahn KOOK uhs"), that is, pancakes. As it is in most of the Christian world, this was the week before Lent, and I write this on Mardi Gras, the day before the Lenten season starts. Here in Latvia and, I presume, in Russia, the whole week before Lent is a time to eat lots of fatty foods and generally make merry. Most of you probably know that Mardi Gras means in French "Fat Tuesday," and it's the day that you clear the fats out of your kitchen by cooking them up so that you can start your Lenten fasting properly on Ash Wednesday. Here it means, as it does in the Anglican tradition, eating pancakes, as many in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States do. In Poland, it means eating jelly donuts known as pączki ("POONCH key"). In general, some kind of filling, fatty food is the norm.

With Natalija, who is ethnically Russian, it means eating blini, those thin Russian pancakes that are similar to French crêpes. I learned how to make them, and given that I already know how to make crêpes, it was easy -- they are pretty much the same thing. We filled them with blueberry and gooseberry conserves and lots of sour cream, the way Russians do, on the assumption that one needs a lot of fat in one's diet in order to get through a long St. Petersburg winter. Here is Natalija, her daughter Veronika, her friend Zane, and her other daughter Emilija. I obviously am taking the photo.

A less familiar tradition is a Russian/Latvian one of burning an effigy of a very tall (maybe 20 feet high) woman figure made of straw before Lent starts. This has, frankly, nothing to do with Christianity, but everything to do with goodbye to winter, which is what she represents. I saw this on the market square in Daugavpils this weekend at a sort of outdoor carnival with merchants, craftspeople, and lots of Russian choirs in folk costumes. (The ones singing traditional Russian folk songs seemed appropriate, and the ones singing cheesy Russian pop a bit less so.) This tradition is a reminder that, for all the Christianity in this part of the world, the Baltics were actually the last part of Europe to get Christianized, and there are a lot of pagan practices still floating around, sometimes attached to Christian traditions and sometimes not. Easter itself is a case in point. Why is the primary holiday -- which is holy day, after all -- of the Christian year named for Eostre, a pagan fertility goddess? My guess is that for the average Latvian, the answer is: why not?