Water fight as Balzritual.

Wet T-Shirt Contest with tradition: In Poland, Easter Monday, the moist-happy affair. With water pistols and buckets to make men hunting on the most beautiful women - some people unhappy in the river lands.

 

Panting, sweating and running the 25-year-old from Kalisz Joasia houses around the corners. The male pursuers are tight on their heels. Why is it just out of the house gone? But you knew exactly how unsafe the streets of their village on that day would be.

Especially when she dares to hope again, finally shaken off their pursuers who need them against an insurmountable brick wall to stop: a dead end! There is no escape anymore. Resignedly Joasia remains are to be her destiny to make. Splash! A few seconds later she is dripping because their clothing is down to the skin.

This fate is not an isolated case. Every Easter Monday in Poland are countless people on the street and even in their own homes victims insidious water attacks. Water bombs, large water pistols, buckets or the nearby lake - every conceivable means, the perpetrators are usually quite young.

But nobody, at least not in the country, came up with the idea to call the police or even compensation for ruined clothing or cell phones to ask. Because of the "poniedziałek Lany", the "Wet Monday", is part of a centuries-old tradition, which goes back to the Middle Ages and just as inseparable as Poland belongs to the cult of Mary, the herb court bigos and John Paul II Your Name: "Smigus Dyngus.

Eheanbahnung with water splash

The first written sources, from the ritualized pouring of water reported to date far into the past: "It is a universal custom of habitually subject to the highest circles of society, that men on Easter Monday the women douse with water," wrote in a Polish medieval historian.

In those days the men penetrated the early morning secretly into houses, the women chosen to be a wet upon awakening. A source from the beginning of the 19th Century holds the reactions: "The girls shriek, but in their hearts they are happy because they know: Those who will remain dry, the same year, no longer married!"

According to Christian interpretation is the custom in the Polish King Mieszko I return. This was on Easter Monday of the year 966 baptized and representative for the whole of Poland can convert to Christianity - the birth of Polish Catholicism. Other sources see the origin of the contrast of wet ritual pagan traditions in order to have a symbolic cleansing of young women in early spring wetted with water.

Much has changed in the centuries that followed, certainly not. Especially in families with children is the day the alleged highest water consumption of the year is still a real highlight. Monika Maliszewska a Mittzwanzigerin from Warsaw, recalls: "Every year my brother took me with a cup of cold water awakened. And every year I made him pre-empt the next time. But he was always faster."

Cooling after Gottestdienst

Meanwhile, many in the emancipation of the water battle arrived. Long, the representatives of the female sex role in their pure and are victims themselves with buckets and water pistols armed. Especially popular is the day in the rural regions of Poland. In some places the priest should himself personally to ensure that its Ministranten Easter Monday after the Fair will receive a small slowdown.

Under Poland's young people is "migus-dyngus" not just pure fun and Tollerei, it also has another, not socially unimportant function: that of a kokettierenden Balzrituals. "It is practically a beauty contest: The more beautiful and desirable is a girl, the more it will be wet," explains Urszula Mochocka from Zabrze - admittedly not add that they themselves always in their youth in the village pond or a specially chartered bath was organized .

The fact that adolescent boys an institutionalized Wet T-Shirt Contest-like, is obvious. The opinions of the female population on the other hand side go far apart. Some simply see the tradition as a childish waste of water and prefer, the whole Easter Monday trapped in their homes to spend.

Others, like Joasia and Monika, looking forward to a day in the year child. But they also criticize the excesses, the "migus-dyngus" betimes can accept. "Today there are no borders anymore. Even old people or people in buses and trams will not be spared," says Monika.

That there is another way, proves the Polish gentleman of the older generation. He also celebrates the tradition of "Nassen Monday". Instead of a water bucket he welcomes the ladies but with a few splashes colognes.