Holy Saturday food blessing

Holy Saturday, also called Great Saturday, is presented in The Peasants as a day when religious observance, household labor, and village custom converge. Its rites move between comic public play, painstaking food preparation, and solemn blessing: the boys stage the burial of the rye soup and herring associated with the Lenten fast, while the women prepare Easter baskets and await the priest. The day’s rituals make communal life visible, but they also disclose its uneven burdens, as Hanka cares for the helpless Boryna amid preparations that others have overlooked.

The boys’ mock burial of Lenten foods

Holy Saturday morning brings the boys to the church for a custom observed from time immemorial: ceremonially burying rye soup and herring, the foods that had tormented them during the Great Fast. With farmhands and older lads absent, the village boys arrange the procession under Jasiek’s lead. They acquire a large pan of rye soup and load it with foul ingredients, while another boy carries a wooden herring carved to resemble the real food.

Witek the Stork-Keeper bears the pan on his shoulders in a cheese net. The boys follow with rattles and clappers, shrieking as they process around the pond and turn onto the poplar road by the church, where the burial is to take place. The mock solemnity collapses when Jasiek strikes the pan with a shovel. It breaks, spilling its contents over Witek. The boys delight in the mishap, but Witek takes offense, attacks Jasiek with his bare hands, and comes to blows with others before breaking away and running home. The episode gives the day’s ritual a rowdy, bodily counterpoint to the measured acts of blessing that follow.

Food prepared for blessing

At Boryna’s home, Hanka, Jagna, and Dominikowa set a large table beneath the gable window beside Boryna’s bed. Though they barely speak to one another, they work together on an elaborate display. Jagna decorates the white cloth with a broad strip of red paper cuttings; at the center stands a painted crucifix adorned with paper flowers. Beneath it, a sheep fashioned from butter rests on an inverted pot, its rosary-bead eyes and red-wool details giving the figure an almost lifelike appearance.

The table is laden with fine-flour sourdough loaves and wheaten cakes made with milk and butter, as well as raisin-studded cakes and smaller portions for Józia Borynianka and the children. Cheese pastries, egg cakes dusted with sugar and colored sprinkles, coils of sausage with peeled hard-boiled eggs, a leg of pork, and brawn complete the spread, which is decorated with painted eggs. The preparations are not only a display of abundance: each dish and ornament has been assembled through household work, and the women are still waiting for Witek to add green whortleberries and weave sedge around the table.

Blessing baskets and renewing the household fire

When the preparations are finished, neighboring women bring their basins, troughs, and pots and place them on a bench beside the table. The priest has arranged for the baskets to be gathered at a few of the first farmers’ cottages because he cannot visit them all individually. Lipce, the village closest to him, is blessed last, sometimes only at dusk. The women do not linger to talk; they leave in time for the church rite of blessing fire and water. Before going, they extinguish the fires in their own cottages so that they can relight them with fresh, blessed fire.

The priest arrives from the manors at dusk, wearing a surplice, with an attendant carrying holy water and an aspergillum. Hanka goes out onto the road to greet him. He enters quickly, recites the prayers, and sprinkles the holy gifts before looking at Boryna’s livid, bearded face. The sequence joins the blessing of food to the blessing of the household, while the renewed fire carries the observance from church ritual back into domestic life.

Care and community within the observance

The day’s preparations do not occupy everyone equally. Seeing that neither Jagna nor the blacksmith’s wife has thought of Boryna, Hanka washes him with warm water, combs his tangled hair, and changes his shirt and bedding. He submits without moving, still staring straight ahead. Her care is a practical, intimate task set beside the more visible work of decorating and preparing food; the holiday’s communal observance does not erase the needs of the sick or guarantee that others will notice them.

The narrative places Holy Saturday’s custom in several registers: the boys’ chaotic procession, the careful making and gathering of food baskets, the priest’s delayed circuit among farm households, and the renewed fire carried back into cottages. Together these actions show a village marking the passage from Lenten privation toward Easter through repeated shared rites, while preserving the differences between public festivity, household responsibility, and religious authority.