Lenten fasting period

The Lenten fasting period is presented not only as a time of religious abstinence but as a shared village experience with a sharply theatrical ending. In Lipce, the Great Fast leaves its mark on food, custom, and communal life; on Great Saturday, the boys publicly bury the rye soup and herring associated with its privations, converting the approach of release into noisy ritual and play.

The fast and its material signs

The clearest measure of the fast is food. During the imprisonment of the village men, Jagustynka describes their meals as meager and unappetizing: pea soup that tastes as if flavored with an old boot and dressed with cart oil, followed by roast millet. The prisoners must pay for their own food, and those without money can add only a prayer to their provisions. Her account is comic in its bluntness, but it also makes deprivation concrete: religious fasting belongs to a village where even ordinary nourishment can be uncertain.

Great Saturday’s mock burial

The fast’s close becomes a collective performance in front of the church. Since there are no farmhands or older lads to lead the custom, the village boys gather early under Jasiek’s direction to bury the rye soup and a wooden herring, treating both as tormentors of the Great Fast. They load the soup into a great pan carried by Witek the Stork-Keeper in a cheese net, while another boy drags the wooden fish. With rattles, clappers, and shouts, the procession circles the pond and heads along the poplar road toward the church.

The mock ceremony is deliberately grotesque: the food associated with fasting is made into a burden, a prop, and the target of a prank. Just as the boys reach the place of burial, Jasiek strikes the pan with a shovel. It breaks apart, spilling the soup and its foul additions over Witek. The crowd delights in the mishap, but Witek responds angrily, attacking Jasiek and then coming to blows with others before breaking free and running home. The ritual therefore carries both communal exuberance and disorder: the fast ends in a joke, but the joke lands on someone’s body and provokes a real quarrel.

Ritual time and village life

The scene makes the religious calendar legible through repeated, shared acts rather than explanation. The boys’ procession takes place in front of the church and follows a customary route around the pond; the ending of the fast is something the village stages together. Its comic inversion of food and ceremony contrasts with more solemn rites elsewhere in Lipce, where blessing, prayer, and processions gather the community around the church and its religious objects. Such episodes place fasting within a wider pattern of village time in which sacred observance and ordinary life meet in public space.

The Lenten fasting period thus has both a bodily and a social dimension. Hunger and restricted food give the custom its subject, while the boys’ procession turns that shared experience into a moment of collective release. Yet the spill over Witek and the ensuing fight prevent the rite from becoming a picture of effortless harmony: communal tradition can gather the village, but its playfulness also exposes friction among its members.