Baptism of the Christ

19 January

After Christmas and once the New Year has arrived, there comes Twelfth Night, the holiday, apparently, for which Shakespeare wrote his play. In some Christian countries this holiday comes with images of the Magi, the Three Kings, and children are given presents to commemorate the gifts brought to the Christ child, presumably on the twelfth day after his birth. Russia, however, has its own way of marking Twelfth Night.

First of all, if we are talking about contemporary Russia, the calendar used by the Orthodox Church, which never switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, as Soviet Russia did after the revolution, is, for now, 13 days behind the secular calendar. This puts Eastern Christmas a whole week after Western New Year’s, posing a challenge to those observing the Christmas fast, since they cannot partake in the traditional New Year’s gluttony.

These days, however, people in Russia’s major cities have begun celebrating Christmas on December 25, not quite understanding that they are marking what their predecessors traditionally referred to as “Catholic Christmas.” Nor do they give too much thought to the fact that they are celebrating one New Year’s Eve on December 31 and continuing the holiday season not just through Orthodox Christmas (January 7), but also through a second (Old) New Year’s Eve (January 13). Some of these days are considered workdays – supposedly it’s time to return to regular life after January 7. But in reality, the festivities continue another week.

Such is our Christmas/New Year’s marathon, with office parties beginning well before the holiday break. Just try to reserve a spot in a restaurant for a large group toward the end of December! If you do manage, the prices will be through the roof. So, in fact corporate holiday events can begin as early as November.

Just when you think the holiday madness has finally ended, when schoolchildren stuffed full of sweets return to school and their parents stagger back to work in a hungover daze, there’s a new twist: Twelfth Night – also known as Epiphany, or rather Kreshcheniye in Russian – and here things get particularly confusing.

Not only is the date of this Christian holiday different in Western and Eastern Christianity, but West and East seem to celebrate different things. While in the West, Epiphany (January 6) celebrates the revelation of God Incarnate as Jesus Christ, the Russian holiday of Kreshcheniye (January 19, because of the 13-day difference in calendars), which translates as “christening” or “baptism,” celebrates Christ’s baptism.

Fact check: According to the New Testament gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, Christ was baptized as an adult, by John the Baptist. Accordingly, the event is represented in any number of famous paintings – Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ, or Alexander Ivanov’s The Appearance of Christ before the People, to name but two. But, in Orthodox Christianity, this fact somehow coexists harmoniously with the belief that Christ was baptized on the twelfth day after his birth, when he was brought to the temple. Probably no painting is able to overcome the traditional idea that people are baptized in childhood. Surely Christ did not walk around un-christened for all those years? The idea that this was a very different sort of baptism and that Christ was, after all, a Jew do not fit easily into the common thinking.

So, Christ was baptized in the River Jordan twelve days after Rozhdestvo (the Russian word for Christmas, which translates as “The Birth”). And Russians have a longstanding tradition of commemorating this event with the ritual of vodosvyatiya (the blessing of waters), whereby a hole is cut in the ice covering rivers or other bodies of water, which are dubbed “the Jordan” for the occasion, and priests sanctify the water therein. We know that, beginning with Peter the Great, the royal family would go out onto the ice in St. Petersburg, and a priest would lower a cross into the water as cannons fired 101 rounds from the Fortress of Peter and Paul. And that was that.

What about actual immersion in the water? In fact, on Kreshcheniye people actually did (and do) sometimes take that frigid plunge, at least there are examples from nineteenth-century literature and memoirs, although this was apparently rare. One comes from Nikolai Leskov’s Cathedral Clergy:

Yesterday, after the blessing of the water, Madam Plodomasova plunged right into the hole in the ice fully dressed. I was amazed! I asked whether she always did that. Always, they told me; she calls it her ‘ablutions.’ What remarkable hardiness! I doubt I could survive even a single such bathing.

In Russia (as well as the rest of the world), there are close links between Christmas traditions and pagan rituals. During Kolyadovaniye, a Slavic tradition with similarities to caroling, children, and often adults, go from house to house singing Christmas carols and asking for presents, especially edible ones. This ritual is closely related to the Anglo-Saxon Halloween, since the days before Christmas, during Svyatki (the 12 days of Christmas, from Christmas Eve to Kreshcheniye), is when the spirits of ancestors are supposed to emerge from the earth. They are represented by people dressed as bears and goats (most people are unaware that these images are ancient totems) and sometimes just with their fur coats turned inside out.

Later these pagan practices began to recede, since people were supposed to be worshiping in church on Christmas, but other old practices were taken up for New Year’s, with feasting on fatty and sweet foods in the hope that this would help bring forth a year of abundance. Ideally, there was pork on the table, since pigs are exceptionally fecund. Husbands would pretend they could not see their wives on the other side of a table laden with pies and pasties – this was supposed to bring about crops so tall you wouldn’t be able to see anything beyond them.

Kreshcheniye is also associated with plenty of traditions of pre-Christian origin involving spirits and fortune-telling. Zhukovsky’s ballad “Svetlana” begins with the lines:

Once upon Kreshcheniye eve,
Girls were telling fortunes.
Out beyond the garden gate,
They threw a shoe to learn their fate.

The idea was that whoever picked up the shoe would have the same name as the owner’s future husband. Such fortune telling was not just a peasant tradition. In Eugene Onegin, the young noblewoman Tatyana also tries to find out whom she would marry. Pushkin had a bit of fun with this: when Tatyana asks the name of a passerby after performing her own superstitious ritual with wax, he replies “Agafon,” a typically peasant name that could not possibly belong to Tatyana’s future husband, who would undoubtedly be a fellow noble.

There are many other rituals associated with Kreshcheniye. In one, fortune tellers drip melted wax into water and try to discern their fate through the various shapes formed. Another involves singing while passing a plate that holds a number of objects under a handkerchief. Whoever has the plate when the song comes to an end takes an object, and if it is a ring, she will be married during the coming year. And finally, the scariest way of fortune telling, one not for maidens faint-of-heart, was to put two mirrors facing one another outside at night and try to discern the face of the fortune teller’s fated betrothed. The problem with this method was that you ran the risk of seeing an evil spirit instead of your future beloved.

Today, telling fortunes during Kreshcheniye is no longer a part of most people’s holiday season. There might be some girls who read Zhukovsky’s “Svetlana” in school and try out the old practices described, but it is unlikely that they take this exercise seriously. Beyond that, these fortune-telling traditions belong largely to the domain of scholarly study by folklorists cataloging the songs and practices of the past.

Yet somehow Kreshcheniye remains one of the most popular holidays in Russia. Rather, it is not so much the holiday overall as the blessing of water that generates enthusiasm. With every year, there are longer and longer lines of people eager to have a jar of water they’ve brought to church blessed. The water will then be drunk a little at a time in the hope this will bring health benefits.

Another increasingly popular aspect of the holiday is the same plunge into icy water taken by Leskov’s Madam Plodomasova, usually in a swimsuit rather than full dress. What used to be an eccentric practice is now fairly common. (Indeed, enter the word “kreshcheniye” into YouTube’s search bar and you’ll see that Russia still has its share of hardy souls.) Politicians dunk themselves in ice holes, perhaps to demonstrate their physical toughness or perhaps their devotion to Orthodoxy and folk traditions, as do movie and rock stars and quite a few regular people. In recent years, even Muslims have begun taking the plunge.

The intensity of the experience is heightened by the fact that January 19 and the ensuing days are known in Central Russia to be particularly cold – the famous Kreshcheniye frost, but the cold snap seems to encourage rather than discourage these cold-water enthusiasts. It is hard to find a simple explanation for this. Not only does the church promote the practice, the media does as well. A few priests offer words to the wise that plunging into winter water is a pagan custom, and that not all water on Kreshcheniye can be considered holy, but this advice generally falls on deaf ears.

Of course, you might consider those who take off their clothes and jump into near-freezing water when the temperature is 25 below Celsius (13 below Fahrenheit) to be victims of a mass media phenomenon, but the idea that water becomes holy on Kreshcheniye existed long before the mass media and can be traced back to ancient, perhaps even pagan beliefs. Indeed, springs and brooks were worshipped in Ancient Rus.

Somehow, every year, the mighty and enduring force of paganism manifests itself during the frosts of Kreshcheniye, and people jump into holes in the ice and bring their jars of water to church, fully convinced that what they are doing is Christian.