Svatodušní svátky (Pentecost)/Letnice
Karel Svolinský (Czech, 1896–1986) Postage stamp depicting Královničky for a series on folk customs of Czechoslovakia, 1974 (engraving by Jindřich Schmidt)
“Pentecost is a period at the beginning of summer when the church celebrates the descent of the Holy Spirit which is considered the beginning of the Christian church. Just like Easter, this period doesn’t have fixed dates. Pentecost is observed fifty days after Easter. It’s called Svatodušní svátky in Czech.”
“Letnice (the Czech name comes from the word léto = summer) is a more folkloric name of the celebrations. Many Czech holidays have preserved their folkloric elements despite the church’s effort to erase them and replace them with Christian celebrations. And Letnice is no different.”
“Therefore, Pentecost is a purely church name of the celebrations commemorating the beginning of the Christian church, Letnice refers also to the folkloric celebrations.”
—Excerpted from czechology.com link at bottom
Whitsun (June 8th this year) or Pentecost is a moveable holiday celebrated seven weeks after Easter. It concludes a fifty-day joyful time that includes the Sunday feast of Pentecost. The Christian Pentecost, commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit, follows on from the Jewish Pentecost, during which the first fruits of bread made from new wheat flour were offered as thanksgiving for the harvest. The church designates Whit Monday as a folk holiday.
Pentecost is often called a green holiday. No wonder. Even before the holiday, homes were decorated with birch and linden branches, and in some places maypoles were also erected in the village square. In the countryside, the Pentecost holidays were closely connected with annual rhythms and agrarian magic. They also preserved the remains of Slavic Rusalia holidays (from Rusalka)/Green Week associated with sacrifices in honor of the deceased, who in the imagination of the people rejoiced in the renewal of life in nature together with their living relatives. (Green week is still celebrated in Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland the week before Whitsun).
The cattle grazing season was beginning, and therefore Pentecost had an important place in shepherding customs and traditions. The importance of water was also considerable. In some places, people bathed in nature for the first time, visited healing springs and drank from certain wells, which were cleaned and decorated with flowers. Originally, these were magical practices to summon rain, related to the importance of moisture for plants during the peak of the vegetation cycle in nature.
Sometimes there were also royal festivities, especially the parades of the queens (pictured above) and the rides of the kings, which we mentioned above. Also in some German villages in the region, on Whit Monday (June 9th this year) we encounter parades of school-age girls with a white-clad Whitsun queen with a flowery bridal wreath on her head called the "Pfingstkönigin", the youngest and most beautiful pre-school girl led by older girls. Girls in front of every house they sang, for which they were presented with eggs, flour, lard and small money, which they collected in a basket. After the tour, the girls gathered at their queen's house, where a small treat of fried eggs awaited them. Similar tours also took place in the north of Lower Austria.
In the 16th century, shooting competitions were held throughout western Moravia. Later, burgher choirs only shot on Corpus Christi. On Whit Monday afternoon, the Znojmo sharpshooting association held a competition for the king of shooters, a late successor to an older custom called "shooting at the bird", which last took place in 1617 in Novosady, where they shot at a leather or wooden bird mounted on a high The winners of the shooting competitions were given special honors every year.
—Google translated from:
Zvyky a tradice obcí na Znojemsku
Pentecost isn't exclusively Czech but there are some interesting folkloric traditions connected with the festival called Letnice in Czech. W
Green week - Wikipedia
