There is a day in late November that the Serbian church gives to a martyr-king and the folk calendar leaves to the wolves. On 24 November (the eleventh on the old calendar) the church keeps the feast of Saint Stefan Dečanski, the king blinded by his father and killed by his son. The folk name for the day is Mratindan, and it comes from neither the king nor the wolves.
The saint behind the day
The feast belongs to Saint Stefan Dečanski, the Serbian king who built the monastery of Visoki Dečani and was kept there as a saint. His full story, the doubted blinding and the disputed death, is on his own page. The church settled his memory on the eleventh of November, and for centuries the day carried the folk name Mratindan alongside it. In 2013 the Serbian church dropped the folk name from its official calendar and returned to keeping the day as Stefan Dečanski’s alone.
Where the name comes from
Mrata is a worn-down Serbian form of Martin. Saint Martin of Tours has his western feast on the eleventh of November, the same date, and Serbs kept a Mrata’s day on it before the king’s feast was set there. A church of Saint Martin, called Mratinja, is named in a fourteenth-century charter. The two days merged, and a social wrinkle helped: those who kept a plain Mrata’s day were looked down on, so people took to saying they kept Saint Dečanski’s day instead. The king’s name gave the old folk day respectability, and the two have shared the date ever since.
The eleventh of November carries a third saint as well. It is the feast of Saint Menas of Egypt, a soldier-martyr of the early church, kept across the wider Orthodox world. Three men, then, share the one day: a Serbian king, a Roman bishop of Tours, and an Egyptian soldier.
The wolf-shepherd and the wolf-days
An older layer lies under the Christian feast. In the folk belief Mrata is a wolf-shepherd, the one who on his day gathers the wolves and portions out their prey for the coming year; once each wolf has its share, they scatter. The ethnographer Veselin Čajkanović read this Mrata as a memory of the old Slavic god of herds and the underworld, Veles, the figure who moves through the folk tales as a great grey or white wolf. It is a reading, not a settled fact.
Late November is the season the folk calendar calls the wolf-days, the vučji dani or Mratinci, a stretch of roughly a week around Mratindan; the sources disagree on where it begins and ends. Through it the household closes in on itself: nothing is given or lent out of the house. No wool is spun and no washing is done; women set down all handwork. Tailors and shoemakers rest their scissors, so that the wolf’s jaws stay shut by the same logic. The wolves themselves are not hunted and, in some places, not even named.
On the eve of Mratindan a bird was killed for the day, a mratinče, a black hen or rooster without a fleck of other colour, and it had to be slaughtered before sunrise. The one who killed it put the act away from himself with a set line: it is not I who kill you, Mrata kills you. And the clear or foggy weather of the wolf-days was read for the winter to come, a bright Mratinci promising a hard frost, a fog promising a soft, changeable season.
Two calendars on one day
The day holds two things that do not quite touch. The church remembers a king who built a great church and died a prisoner of his own son, and asks no more of the date than that. The folk calendar keeps a wolf-shepherd counting out the winter’s kills, and shuts the house against the season. They share a name that belongs to neither of them, taken from a bishop of Gaul whose own feast fell, by chance, on the same November day.
Sources
Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.
- The Serbian Orthodox Church calendar entries for 11 November (Sveti kralj Stefan Dečanski), and the note that the church dropped the folk name ‘Mratindan’ from the official calendar in 2013
- Serbian Wikipedia, Мратиндан, on the derivation of the name from Saint Martin and the folk transfer of the day onto Stefan Dečanski
- Veselin Čajkanović, studies in Serbian religion and folklore (the reading of Mrata as a wolf-shepherd figure behind the god Veles/Dažbog)
- Serbian ethnographic coverage of the Mratinci / vučji dani (the wolf-days: the lending, spinning and washing taboos, the mratinče sacrifice, the weather lore)
