Slava..

In Serbia Slava is a fest that celebrates the day of the family- patron saint. It is the most important fest in Serbia and is celebrated gladly and lavishly.

Other that the usual holidays,every family celebrates the fest of their own patron saint and so on different days.

The family-patron saint is ideally passed on from the head of the family, the father to the son. In any case from generation to generation and not until the death bed.

Now Vladimir’s mom is still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but hasn’t held Slava for years and so Vladimir “officially” took over Slava from his mom this years and yesterday we celebrated Sveti Nikola on December 19th.

Sveti Nikola

Randomly Vladimir has an icon from Sveti Nikola, since he inherited some icons from his uncle. So he rummaged the icon of Sveti Nikola from the furthest hiding place and was allowed to attend our party. 

Actually we want, that Irma can experience the fest too. For little kids these parties are certainly really exciting and we have fun in having a reason, to invite friends and family.

Otherwise we can’t manage to do something like that, since the everyday life turns into routine.

And you can call me conservative, but in my opinion it’s important to have and keep traditions.

Even when you create, invent and live them after your own idea yourself. But somehow traditions keep family and friends together.

If you hold a Slava once, you're obligated to repeat it every year until you pass it on to the next one. You don’t invite just family, but also friends and acquaintances.

If you have the chance to witness the fest, you’ll realize quickly, that it doesn’t have a lot to do with church anymore, but a lot more with 3 days of live music and a lot of Schnapps. Therefor a serious marathon for the host, since you can’t ask people kindly to leave.

The same applies to the guests, if you attend Slava once you have to come back every year, or you're getting rebuked. And that can be really exhausting, since a lot of times more families’ Slava is on the same day and so it turns into a party hopping, whereby you have to eat and drink a lot at every Slava.

Additionally for the future as a guest you have to remember when and where you were invited at. Because for the following ones you won’t be invited but expected.

We had a small Slava, had no live music and only close friends and family were invited. And we definitely didn’t want to celebrate for 3 days, but only limited the festivities to yesterday. Still it was a fun party.

Irma definitely loved to have so many guests at home and ran around merry the whole day and squeaking through the apartment.

So the party was small and nice but quite successful.

From all the original Slava traditions we only kept the icon, a burning candle and the food.

Sveti Nikola, Žito und Kolač

For the greeting we handed the guests uninitiated Kolač, a wheat bread with plait and Slovo, a stamp in cyrillic characters with Christ-Initials NC-XC-HN-KA with the meaning “Jesus Christ wins” and Žito, a wheat mash with sugar and who wants, ground walnuts. The mash is so sticky sweet, that can only eat one spoon of it anyway.

Žito und Kolač

Slava is a fast day and the food that is served is vegetarian or fish. So for me, as non meat eater, perfect. And my sister, who is a vegetarian since I can think gushed about the food still days later.

švedski sto

Vladimir’s mom Mirjana came from Belgrade, to cook all those delicious meals.

She came early in the morning a day before and cooked until Slava started without a break.

Mirjana served

Gibanica (a kind of serbian Börek) with different types of vegetables like potatoes or mushrooms, vegetarian Sarma (filled herb leaves)

Prebranac (baked beans),

Podvarak (a sauerkraut meal, the technically is served with meat) and since we didn’t know, how many people would come mom contributed

Janssons Frestelse (Swedish potatoes-anchovies casserole) and spinach-feta-quiche

Gibanica und Prebranac

Prebranac, Sarma, Janssons Frestelse und Podvarak 

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