Ethnology is a favourite section among readers of the SAVEN blog. We have already written there about how our ancestors heated their homes, what they used to light them, and what the word "hrubka" meant. In this article we tell the story of an equally interesting custom connected with the stove — a young unmarried woman scratching at the stove during a marriage proposal.
What did matchmaking and scratching the stove mean?
Traditionally, matchmaking in Ukrainian families took place when the suitor came to the house of a prospective bride together with matchmakers. They set out to propose late in the evening, so that in the event of a refusal the whole matter could be kept secret. The visit was played out as a little theatrical scene:
- the matchmakers might be "hunters" with a "prince" chasing a "marten — a fair maiden", whose trail had led them to this house;
- or they might be wealthy merchants from a distant land who had come for precious goods.
Painting by Vasyl Vasyliev, "Dressing the Bride"
They brought bread and salt with them, as a sign that they came with good intentions. The girl's father invited the matchmakers inside and questioned them about where they had come from, what land was theirs, and what the young man was like.
During all this the young woman had to stand by the stove — because the stove was the heart of domestic comfort and the protector of the family line. If she agreed to marry the young man, she scratched at the stove with her fingernails. The custom was well known enough to appear in nineteenth-century Ukrainian literature: in Ivan Nechuy-Levytsky's prose a father calls out to his daughter to come and start scratching the stove, because the suitor has arrived with his brother.
This scratching of the stove was a symbol of parting from the family hearth in order to build a new one. At the same time, particles of the home's warmth got under the girl's fingernails — warmth she wished to take with her to her new house.
Painting by Mykola Pymonenko, "The Matchmakers"
Is there another explanation of this custom?
Yes. According to another version, midwives used to seal a piece of a newborn girl's umbilical cord into the stove after the birth. At the matchmaking the future bride would scratch out her own piece and — if she agreed to marry — take it with her to her mother-in-law's house, so that the newly created family would be strong and so that she herself would give birth easily in future.
What has the stove become today?
The customs have gone, but the role of the hearth as the centre of the home has not. What has changed is the technology: the clay stove has been replaced by closed fireplace inserts and stoves with heat-resistant glass, in which most of the heat returns to the room instead of escaping up the chimney, while the simple flue channel has given way to certified modular chimney systems. The warmth that once radiated straight from the heated clay is now carried into the room by ventilation grilles in the fireplace surround.
SAVEN — let us keep our heritage alive together!