Easter Monday water-dousing custom (Dyngus)

The Easter Monday water-dousing custom (Dyngus) is presented in Lipce as both a boisterous game and a shared village ritual. Water passes from hand to hand, from boys to girls and back again, while a separate group of boys carries a cockerel from cottage to cottage, singing religious verses in return for small gifts. The scenes make the custom a distinctly public event: it animates the village after winter, draws children and adults into the same round of celebration, and joins bodily play to the calendar of Easter.

Setting and Form

The custom takes place on Easter Monday, after a spring morning marked by dew, blue mist, sunlight, birdsong, and the ringing of church bells. The day’s brightness is not just a backdrop: the renewed countryside and the lively movement of people through gardens, farmyards, and paths give the water games their expansive, communal character. People wash outside their homes, while the ordinary sounds of work and village life continue around the festivities.

The action has two related forms. In one, boys and girls chase and splash one another with water. In the other, boys travel together with a cockerel, sticks, bags, and a fiddle, singing at the priest’s house and then at the village cottages. One form is improvised and competitive; the other follows a recognizable route and earns a response from those visited. Together they make celebration visible across Lipce’s shared spaces, rather than confining it to the church or a single household.

The Water Games

The boys begin by carrying sprinklers, splashing one another and lying in wait at the pond for passers-by. Their play crosses the threshold of private homes as well: anyone stepping outside can be drenched, and water runs down the walls and gathers in grey puddles in front of the houses. The description stresses the game’s spread through both public paths and individual farmyards, where shouts, laughter, and pursuit build into a village-wide commotion.

When the girls join in, the balance shifts. There are enough of them, and they are grown enough, to get the better of the boys; they chase them through the gardens. One young man who has turned a fire hose on Nastka is set upon by the Balcerek girls, soaked, and pushed into the pond. The episode makes the custom reciprocal rather than a simple license for boys to target girls: the first advantage changes hands, and the aggressor becomes the butt of the game.

The boys then organize a counter-attack. With Pietrek, Witek the Stork-Keeper, and other older boys enlisted, they ambush Nastka and take her to the well, where they soak her until she cries out. They also give Marysia Balcerkówna a thorough drenching, prompting her mother to rush to her with a stick. Jagna is spattered with mud, and even Józka Boryna is caught; she runs to Hanka the Farmstead Keeper to complain. Jagustynka, by contrast, turns her own soaking into a merry lament. The sequence shows how the ritual’s exuberance can reach nearly everyone, while also allowing participants to protest, retaliate, and laugh at the disorder.

The Cockerel, Song, and Gifts

Alongside the splashing, Witek the Stork-Keeper leads a group of boys out onto the road. They carry sticks and shoulder bags; Witek has Pietrek’s fiddle under his arm, wears Boryna’s cap at a tilt, and walks at the head of the procession. They go first to the Parish Priest of Lipce, following the route farmhands had taken in previous years. In the presbytery garden, they line up and push the cockerel to the front, turning the bird into the group’s conspicuous emblem.

Witek plays while another boy winds up the group’s performance and imitates a crow. Beating time with their sticks and stamping in turn, they sing: “We’ve come after Dyngus, / To sing about Jesus, / O Jesus, O Maria – / Our cap is right here!” Their appeal combines a seasonal greeting, devotional words, and a practical request. The boys sing for a long time, growing louder and bolder until the priest comes out, gives each of them ten groszy, praises the cockerel, and dismisses them kindly. He also sends out a girl with sweet cake; the boys answer with a song of thanks before moving on to the organist’s house.

Witek’s private unease briefly complicates the confident performance: he sweats with fear that the priest will ask about the stork, but the priest does not recognize him among the boys. The group’s success depends on acting together, with the cockerel, fiddle, song, and costume-like tilt of Boryna’s cap making a small procession out of a band of children. After the visit to the priest, they continue to every cottage. Children swarm around them, eager to touch the cockerel’s feathers, and the boys have to protect it from the crush.

Communal Meaning

The two strands of the celebration place different kinds of exchange side by side. In the water games, the participants trade advantage through pursuit and reprisal; in the singing procession, the boys offer music and a seasonal greeting, and householders respond with money or food. The customary visit also gives children a public role: they approach the priest and the cottages as a group, perform before adults, and receive acknowledgment in return.

The religious element is present in the song to Jesus and Maria and in the first visit to the priest, but the celebration is not limited to solemn observance. Stamping, splashing, mock complaint, laughter, the cockerel’s feathers, and the boys’ growing confidence give the day a playful physical energy. Adults become part of that atmosphere too: the priest rewards the singers, a mother hurries to defend her drenched daughter, and Jagustynka complains merrily about being soaked. In its movement from pond and garden to presbytery and cottage door, the custom briefly makes the whole village a stage for shared festivity.