The butter-soaked holiday that says goodbye to winter

For a week every winter, troikas, toboggans, and pancakes take center stage in Eastern Slavic communities as they take to the hills, city squares, and churches to celebrate Maslenitsa, one of the region’s most ancient festivals. Though mainly associated with Russia, Maslenitsa is often celebrated in parts of the Eastern Slavic world, including Ukraine and Belarus. 

Like Mardi Gras and Carnival, Maslenitsa is a Lenten Christian holiday, though it aligns specifically with the Russian Orthodox Church. Known as “Butter Festival,” when celebrants feast on butter-soaked pancakes and other indulgences, Maslenitsa lets people eat, drink, and be merry before Lent, a 40-day period of fasting and abstinence leading up to Easter, the day marking Jesus’s resurrection. Dairy products like butter are traditionally forbidden during Lent, so Maslenitsa gives Slavs one last blowout to indulge in revelry, butter, and merriment before they give it up for the next several weeks, when self-discipline and sacrifice cleanses them spiritually and helps them prepare for is the holiest day of the Christian year. 

Maslenitsa is more than just a Slavic Mardi Gras, however. With its roots in Russia’s pagan past, it’s a celebration of the sun and the coming of spring. Here's how Maslenitsa became a signature festival and how communities have traditionally celebrated it.

Maslenitsa’s pagan roots

Maslenitsa may be tied to the Christian calendar today, but its roots pre-date the Russian Orthodox Church. 

“Before Russia adopted Christianity in 988, pagan people practiced a cult of the sun,” says scholar Darra Goldstein, Williams College’s Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit professor Emerita of Russian, and author of The Kingdom of Rye: A Brief History of Russian Food. Maslenitsa played a key role in this belief system. Originally celebrated near the spring equinox in late March, it marked the end of winter, the return of spring, and all that it represented: fertility, abundance, and the defeat of light over darkness. 

(The new year once started in March—and January didn't exist.)

Food has always essential to this celebration. “They baked round pancakes on hot stones in the shape of the sun to welcome its return,” Goldstein says. 

Over time, these pancakes became the festival’s signature food. Known as a blini, or dense and yeasty buckwheat pancake, these buttery treats can be crowned with a variety of sweet or savory toppings like butter, jam, caviar, or sour cream. 

After Russia adopted Christianity in the 10^th century, the Russian Orthodox Church moved Maslenitsa earlier in the year to occur just before Lent. The Church “adapted this practice and allowed blini to morph into the premier symbol of indulgence during Maslenitsa, thereby blessing excess and encouraging feasting on rich foods that would soon be proscribed during the Lenten fast,” Goldstein explains. 

(Read about the Russian Orthodox communities resurrecting across the land.)

The weeklong party

Maslenitsa unfolds with a series of ritualized activities for every day of the week. The festival always begins on a Monday. It’s the “welcome day” when celebrants traditionally greet the holiday’s leading lady: Lady Maslenitsa, “a straw-stuffed effigy [that represents] winter," Goldstein explains. They dress her in old clothes, place the effigy on poles, and carry her on a sleigh, accompanied by folk songs like “We’re Welcoming Maslenitsa” and “Shine, the Sun’s Light Brighter.” 

The “wonderfully porous” blinis—as Goldstein describes them—feature heavily throughout the week’s celebrations. “Each day was designated for a different way of sharing pancakes, as a means of solidifying familial relations,” she says. On the Wednesday of the festive week, for example, mothers-in-law traditionally shared blini with their sons-in-law. 

The subsequent days of the festive week have traditionally been devoted to merrymaking with family, friends, and neighbors. Goldstein says some of Maslenitsa’s celebrations align with other Carnival traditions, including feasting, masquerades, and entertainment like concerts, dance parties, street carnivals, puppet performances, bear shows, and even fist fights. Traditionally, Russians also celebrate with activities like sledding, troika rides, and ice skating.

Burning away the past 

The end of the festival comes on Sunday, when people confess their sins in church and ask friends and families for forgiveness for past wrongs. These acts of atonement give opportunities to repent for the revelry of the prior week and transition into the piety of Lent. 

The final day of Maslenitsa also bids farewell to Lady Maslenitsa. In traditional celebrations in rural Russia, the entire village would gather to set the straw effigy on fire, according to Goldstein. Villagers would often throw old clothes and objects onto the bonfire, burning away the past to make room for the future. 

“After the effigy had burned, her ashes were scattered on fields and gardens to ensure a fruitful harvest,” Goldstein says. 

Some communities also drowned Lady Maslenitsa in Slavic rituals as a symbolic end to cold, death, and bad weather, welcoming the season of spring. 

Maslenitsa remains a beloved festival

Maslenitsa’s popularity may have ebbed and flowed over the years, but it’s always endured. The early Soviet era largely pushed Maslenitsa from public life, and some people instead celebrated privately. By the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, modern Russians had revived Maslenitsa and its folk customs.

Though straw effigies still feature in today’s celebrations, Goldstein notes that “Maslenitsa is no longer ritualized as it once was.” Now, she says, it’s “more about eating blini at home or as street food.” 

Today’s Maslenitsa certainly isn’t as revelrous as it once was—officials try to curb public fist fights and the burning of effigies in hazardous places—but people still celebrate it in some of the old ways, like by attending carnivals and concerts, participating in masked balls, and eating blini. The biggest Maslenitsa celebrations today occur in Moscow, where in 2018 over 4.75 million people gathered to celebrate by attending hundreds of events, massive pancake fairs, and concerts.

(Discover Moscow's colorful cathedrals.)

In its millennia-long history, Maslenitsa and its enduring popularity prove that as long as there’s springtime, people will want to celebrate the return of sunshine and the promise of warmer days ahead.