Richard Rousch can barely breathe inside his heavy sheepskin suit. Overwhelmed by the smell of schnapps and animal fur, he can barely see through the eyeholes. A professional firefighter, he remarked that his “fire gear is more comfortable than the Kurenti costumes,” handsewn in Slovenia. Three years ago, he broke his leg from the weight of the costume as he jumped up and down to make the bells tied to his waist ring.
It is a formidable, sometimes dangerous task, but he wouldn’t trade it for anything.
The Kurent (also spelled Korent) is a pagan spirit, believed to scare away winter, embodied during the Kurentovanje Festival, held the week before the start of the Lenten season in Slovenia. Traditionally, those who dress as Kurents are fully covered in wool, accented by bright red stockings. Their tall hats are adorned with colorful ribbons, and brass bells hang from their waists. Rousch is one of a growing cohort of Slovenian Americans making the Kurentovanje Festival their own in the St. Clair neighborhood of Cleveland.
A Festival Way to Ward off Father Winter
Although Kurenti are much older and widespread across Slovenia, the first Kurentovanje Festival was held in the city of Ptuj during the 1950s to rekindle carnival and costume festivities that largely died out by the early twentieth century. Prior to the eighth century, Slovenians worshipped a pantheon of Slavic gods and practiced traditions closely associated with animism. As such, Slovenians dressed up as demons of good or bad will, usually named “Beautiful Ones” or “Ugly Ones” based on their appearances. The Ugly Ones scared away Old Man Winter, or Pust, by burning an effigy of the elderly figure and welcomed spring during the month now called February. When Slavic tribes converted to Christianity in the 700s, people continued to dress up, although the practice was condemned by the Christian Church.
“There are variations of it in Slovenia, but it’s also something that is pre-Slavic, pre-Christian,” said Noah Charney, a presenter at last year’s Cleveland Kurentovanje Festival. “There are festivals that look similar throughout Europe, equally weird and otherworldly, where people don costumes that make them look like sort of bear monsters throughout a swath of Europe, basically at the same longitude from the Iberian peninsula through Northern Italy, Switzerland, Slovenia and on through Romania. What is consistent about those territories is they were the home of the Celts.”
The Christian Church pushed back on this tradition not only for its invocation of demons but because of its origins. According to Aleš Ivančič, president of the Kurent Ethnographic Society of Ptuj, Kurentovanje is the modern manifestation of an ancient fertility ritual. Kurent also references the god of merriment and drinking alcohol—in Slavic mythology, two elements central to carnival. In a tale about the crafty Kurent the Musician, recorded by Matevž Ravnikar, Kurent is compared to the Roman god Bacchus. Slovenian scholar Slavko Ciglenečki argues that the Kurenti relate to the mythological figures Cybele and Attis, which are significant to Slovenia’s pagan religion.
The Church first fought against these practices but then eventually absorbed them into Shrovetide festivities, and now many people conflate the Kurenti with the onset of Lent, Christianizing this very pre-Christian ritual.
“The timing [of the Kurentovanje Festival] is Christianized but the rituals are not,” Charney explained.
In fact, the Kurent has found its way into Slovenian folk tales involving Jesus and his apostles, including Voznik gnoja v luni (The Man Carting Manure on the Moon). In this story, a man is turned into a bull by Jesus and St. Peter in punishment for his bad deeds and given to a local villager. If the villager did not slaughter or whip the bull for seven years, Jesus promised the villagers a bountiful harvest each year. By the seventh year, crops would be extraordinarily abundant, and on Shrovetide, Jesus would collect the Kurent. On that day, the people of the town made merry in celebration of those abundant crops—thus embedding a pagan nature spirit into a Christian parable.
Despite this rich history, most people who attend the Cleveland Kurentovanje Festival are unaware of its pagan origins. Kathryn Zitko, a member of the festival planning committee, explains: “People view it more as a merry-making way to celebrate Slovenian culture during a cold, dark time of the year when they yearn to believe that the Kurents will chase away winter to make room for spring.”
During the pandemic, events shifted online. Mythology and folklore experts were brought in—Charney among them—to teach both attendees and participants more about the holiday’s origins.
Bringing the Tradition to the U.S.
The Cleveland Kurentovanje Festival is much younger than its sister festival in Ptuj. It was founded in 2013 by a group of Slovenian Americans through the support of the St. Clair-Superior Development Corporation. These individuals were largely the descendants of Slovenian immigrants who settled here in the twentieth century. Today, Cleveland is home to more than 40,000 individuals of Slovenian heritage, the largest number outside of Slovenia. In 1903, Slovenians in the St. Clair area began collecting donations to establish the Slovenian National Home, which opened to the public in March 1924 and today stands at the heart of the festival.
Despite there being a large Slovenian community in Cleveland and the surrounding area, the festival’s founders wanted to engage the city’s non-Slovenian residents in their culture. Today, the annual Cleveland Kurentovanje Festival lasts more than a week and features arts and cultural programming alongside a large parade and festival. Since the pandemic, organizers continue to host virtual cultural talks and events as well.
For executive committee member Nicole Kusold-Matheou, this is what makes the festival special: it creates opportunities for people in Cleveland and beyond to come together through Slovenian heritage and to forge new connections across the United States and the world.
Rousch has attended Cleveland Kurentovanje Festival ever since it started in 2013. He adored the Kurenti and became involved with the organizing committee at the start of the pandemic. Before his involvement, no one wrangled the Kurenti, which Rousch notes were largely fueled by alcohol. Along with leading the Cleveland Kurenti, he cleans and maintains the eleven costumes, purchased by the Slovenian Museum and Archives and the Cleveland Kurentovanje Festival directly from the Klinc family in Slovenia.
The Cleveland festival challenges traditional restrictions regarding who could wear costumes. What is a rite of passage for young men in Slovenia is, in Cleveland, a welcome celebration of everyone who claims Slovenian identity. Traditionally, only unmarried men wore the Kurenti costumes, but in the United States, married men, married and unmarried women, and children can also wear the costumes. Additionally, unlike tradition that forbids Kurenti from taking off their “heads,” many children’s faces are seen smiling on St. Clair Avenue.
While the Kurenti may appear out of place to unknowing onlookers, they represent an ultimately American story. Like many immigrant communities in the United States, Cleveland’s Slovenian Americans first settled in an insular town and are recognizing and revitalizing pre-Christianized traditions from the Old Country, bringing them into the twenty-first century. What’s different is that most immigrant communities founded festivals like the Cleveland Kurentovanje several decades ago, and these events ultimately fizzled out. Cleveland’s festival is only twelve years old and getting larger every year.
This is likely for two reasons. First, this festival is explicit about its pagan roots. As more Americans identify as spiritual but not religious, people are developing their own practices involving their ancestors’ folk traditions and those of others. Second, seeing and wearing the Kurenti is an otherworldly experience. The fantastical and fearsome Kurenti transport visitors back to ancient Slovenia, when seasonal rituals dictated the passage of time and spirituality was closely tied to multiple senses—the smell of burning straw and dank sheepskin and the sound of clanging bells. Just as they did centuries ago, these festivals unite towns and reinforce their cultural roots.
The practice of dressing up in costumes and causing mischief is well known in American Halloween, but few recognize that this tradition is also a form of mummering (or mumming)—the folkloric practice of dressing up and dancing as spiritual figures. The growth of Cleveland’s festival mimics growing attention and revitalization of mummering traditions today and a push for authentic costumes and celebrations that recognize the cultural heritage behind many of our common traditions.
Cleveland’s Kurentovanje Festival may seem out of place—a pagan party held in the middle of the Rust Belt—but its popularity reflects a hunger many Americans feel for an authentic and transcendent communal experience. When Rousch dons that costume and thirty pounds of bells, he steps inside of the same figure his ancestors dressed up and danced as centuries before. Anonymous and unencumbered, he dances with abandon down St. Clair Avenue, tethering singing, dancing, and laughing onlookers to an ancient ritual that they will likely encounter nowhere else in the United States.
Emma Cieslik is a museum professional and religious scholar in the Washington, D.C., area and a former curatorial intern at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.
This article is a project of the 2023 Smithsonian Folklife Festival program Creative Encounters: Living Religions in the U.S., exploring rituals and values that shape American cultural traditions.
