It is a twisted thread of wool, one red and one white, whose main purpose is protection and good luck.
On that day, people gift each other with an adornment, a brooch but mostly a bracelet. On March 1, people greet each other with “Happy Baba Marta’s Day!” and wear red and white bracelets called martenitsa. The name of the Bulgarian mythical figure is one of the almost 1,400 Bulgarian geographical names in the icy continent. However, her moody persona did not stop her from having an ice-free beach called Baba Marta Beach in Antarctica. That is why the weather in March is uncertain-sometimes sunny and warm, sometimes frosty and snowy.Īnother folktale says that she is a nice old lady who wants to dispatch her grumpy brothers, January and February. The general idea is that she is an errant senior woman who sometimes gets angry and sometimes cheerful. This early rough lesson aside, the local folklore says that Baba Marta is the only sister of 11 brothers-months. That discovery led to the inevitable question, which was also the hardest: Is Grannie Marta real? That unbearable thought was also the first hit on childhood innocence. I also remember that the red and white dress that Marta wore was remarkably similar to auntie Maria’s, one of my nursery teachers.
When I was five years old, I was excited by the prospect of the appearance of Grannie Marta in our kindergarten. Better known as Baba Marta, the latter is a Bulgarian folklore image of March and symbolises the end of the cold days of winter and the advent of spring. While children in the Western world face the cruel reality by discovering the hidden “truth” about Santa, kids in the Balkans deal with a similar issue: the Grannie March.
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