A play to banish the darkness

In Bulgarian folk tradition, the kukeri are performers who conduct public rituals and visit homes each January to symbolically banish the winter and its attendant evil spirits, thereby welcoming the return of spring. Dressed in costumes made from fur, wool and wood, they wear noisy cattle bells and may be adorned with macabre elements, including real or crafted animal skulls and other taxidermied parts. As in UK mumming traditions, the troupe (including archetypes such as a priest, a king, young lovers and death personified) perform short plays depicting death, procreation and rebirth. Believed to be thousands of years old with its roots in antiquity, the tradition has survived through eras of Ottoman occupation and communist rule. Scholarly work on the subject has considered the kukeri from archaeological and anthropological perspectives and examines the contemporary kukeri within a paradigm of post-socialist national and folk revival. This chapter explores new dimensions by assessing the tradition through the lens of dark event studies. The chapter critically evaluates the performance of this public dark ritual as a mode of ‘domesticating death’, as well as exploring the transtemporal nature of such dark symbolism and its role in building and maintaining a shared national identity.