A Moldavian wedding is truly a colorful, unforgettable celebration with a special southern flavor with its own traditions and customs.
And what songs and dances these people have! Whether you like it or not, your arms and legs will burst into dance! The newlyweds carefully prepare for the celebration of a Moldovan wedding a year before the celebration. When choosing a date, the church calendar is taken into account so that the selected day does not fall on a church holiday or fast. After the date is confirmed, the couple begins preparations for the important day in their lives.
Many questions arise, namely, compiling a list of guests, a menu of treats, searching for witnesses and “our guides.” According to Moldovan customs, every young couple should have “nashauls” - these are a kind of named second parents, whom the young couple themselves choose. In the future, this couple will be an example for their family life and will provide assistance in any issues related to housekeeping.
Outfits of Moldovan newlyweds
In Moldova, at weddings that take place in villages and villages, they often resort to national traditions, including in clothing. Traditional costumes in Moldova are real works of art. As a rule, decorating outfits takes a lot of effort and time, because they are hand-embroidered with threads and beads. The key color remains white - the main color of the wedding. However, the suit can be embroidered with red, black and blue threads.
Wedding in Moldova: dressing the newlyweds
A Moldavian wedding begins with the preparation of the bride and groom for the holiday. Friends and witnesses help dress the young people. The groom is dressed first. Together with his comrades, he goes to the Nanashi’s house, where the ceremony of invitation to the wedding takes place. According to custom, the groom hands over rolls of bread neatly laid out on an embroidered towel to the seated father and mother. Having accepted the kalachi, the married couple agrees to become nanashi. Further, the witnesses, who in Moldova are called vornichel and druzhka, and nanashi, go together with the groom for his beloved.
The Moldovan bride also goes through a dressing ceremony, in which her bridesmaids help her. The ritual is accompanied by beautiful songs dedicated to saying goodbye to the parental home and friends.
Original rituals
In the south of Moldova, when buying a bride, they traditionally dance the “Veil Dance”. Previously, the groom brought the entire bride's outfit to the wedding, but now only the veil. The bride had to give a return gift - embroider a shirt for her future husband with her own hands.
They exchanged their gifts through witnesses. A vornichel with a shirt in his hands, and a vornichy with a veil, dance around the bride and groom, and they must either show agility or pay a ransom.
“Masa Mare” is a kind of ritual of collecting gifts from guests. The newlyweds and nanashi mutually wash their hands directly in the hall where the wedding takes place. Then the nanashi take turns approaching the guests, and they congratulate the newlyweds and throw money on the tray.
The amount is immediately announced publicly. After collecting all the gifts, the nanashi calculate the total amount of money collected at the wedding.
The bride treats the guests to cake, but only after she has taken off her veil and put on a scarf and apron. After this, gifts are laid out: sets, bed linen, blankets, and a pillow with a long needle. The groom is seated on a pillow, and the bride sits on his lap.
Nanash takes a needle in his hands and through the pillow stabs the groom in the sirloin. If the groom jumps up in pain and does not hold the bride in his arms, then he will not be able to cope with the pricks of fate in life’s troubles.
When he passes this test, his family will be strong and his love will be eternal.
Moldavian bride – ransom of a beauty
A wedding in Moldova involves an unusual ritual before the first meeting of the newlyweds. You will be surprised when you learn how the bride is bought in Moldovan traditions. When the groom arrives at his beloved’s house, an interesting custom occurs - bargaining for the bride. A sharp knife is inserted into the door frame, which symbolizes the gate. The bride must give symbolic consent to get married. If she agrees, the groom takes a knife from the door frame and lets the groom into the house of his beloved. Next, the parents bless the couple, and everyone goes to register the marriage.
Selection of catches
One of the most important moments in preparation is the selection of our catches. This concept is usually understood as the second couple, which is necessarily present at the wedding celebration.
The young people face a difficult choice. Only married couples become nashaulami. In this case, several criteria are taken into account.
- They must be older than the bride and groom, but younger than their mother and father.
- To be wealthy and wealthy people.
- Willingness to become patrons and mentors of the bride and groom.
Gingerbread, rolls or buns are used as invitations. If guests refuse an invitation, it is considered a sign of disrespect. That's why people most often accept gifts. The duty of the nashauls is to organize the wedding celebration and support the newlyweds in all their endeavors. They are considered the second parents of the bride and groom. In modern times, acquaintances, friends and parents of newlyweds are chosen for this role.
The next stage of preparatory activities is submitting an application to the registry office and booking the premises where the celebration will be held. A dowry is also collected and a holiday script is drawn up.
Celebrating a Moldovan wedding
Moldovan weddings have some similar customs to neighboring countries. Some customs were borrowed from Ukraine, some from Romania. Since Moldova also has a Jewish community, both Moldovan and Jewish wedding rituals can be observed at the celebration of the two nations. Traditionally, the meeting of newlyweds takes place with rolls, just like in Russia and Ukraine - with bread and salt. You need to dip a piece of kalach in salt and feed it to your soulmate. Next, the guests are treated to homemade wine and begin to congratulate the newlyweds. After congratulations, the newlyweds and guests begin the meal.
What are guests treated to at a Moldovan wedding?
A wedding in Moldovan villages always means lush tables and cheerful, noisy celebrations. On the table there are classic wedding cuts, as well as national Moldovan dishes, beloved by local residents. If the wedding takes place in autumn, then expect a magnificent table, because it is at this time that the country harvests vegetables and fruits. Moldova is also famous for its delicious aromatic wine, without which no holiday is complete. If you are lucky enough to attend a Moldovan celebration, the website for newlyweds Svadebka.ws would recommend that you try the national dishes.
Snacks:
- Gogoshary in Moldavian
- Fakeluite beans
Meat dishes:
- Entrecotes
- Zrazy
First meal:
- Chorba
- Zama
Flour products:
- Kalachi
- Kulichi
- Placinda
- Vertuta
A wedding is an important moment in life, to which everyone takes different paths. But the stupidest thing is that at that moment when all doubts have passed, and all these paths have converged, and you are ready to live your whole life with your loved one in war or harmony, nothing scares you... except the initiation rite itself.
In our opinion, a typical wedding is terrible inside and out, from the garters on the bride’s stockings to the uncle’s cousin’s husband who came from nowhere, whom you have never seen and it is not clear why you should look at him on this exciting day.
We know there are other weddings! Outdoor weddings with friends and loved ones. Simple and cute, but no less solemn and memorable. We will tell you about them today. About the experience of organizing such weddings, the pros and cons, difficulties and cost of the issue.
Olga Baichurina is a designer who professionally designs and organizes weddings.
“Weddings in nature are most often done by unusual, cheerful, creative couples, they are not afraid to experiment. Basically, such couples themselves come up with ideas for holding a celebration in nature. Next we need to decide on a topic, and go ahead!”
“The very process of organizing and decorating a wedding in nature is different in that you have to think more about logistics, more often it is quite far from the city, and if you forget something, you can lose a lot of precious time, everything needs to be thought through to the smallest detail, to think through cases if there is wind or it will rain.
Preparing decor for a wedding takes from a week to two, maximum three. It mainly depends on the amount of manual work. It usually takes 2-3 days to develop the concept, theme, and work out the details. The cost of registration is on average 600 euros.”
“We don’t have many places where we could celebrate such a wedding. For me, the further from the city, the better. Advantages: clean air, beautiful scenery, a special romantic atmosphere away from the city noise. In Chisinau, you can have a wedding in the Arboretum and Botanical Garden, you can go out of town to Sky Land or Poiana Bradului.
As a designer, I prefer themed outdoor weddings. At such weddings, you don’t need to be tied to the existing interior - a complete flight of imagination, plenty of space, you can express yourself and even act like a hooligan! I AM FOR experiments!”
Wedding of Denis and Valentina
“Our wedding took place in the Botanical Garden: under the open sky, in the middle of the lake, on a small island. Everything was spontaneous for us. To be honest, we are generally against this kind of ceremony. We would like to spend this OUR day together, but love and respect for our parents pushed us to organize at least a small celebration.
We booked the place two weeks before the wedding (it was very difficult to find a place that suited our desires and capabilities). Active preparations began a week before the wedding. Everything was done last minute, from our wedding clothes to our table decor! Only the closest friends and relatives were invited to the wedding, 20 people in total. All the men were wearing bowties.”
“Wedding design ideas and their implementation were the result of painstaking and very efficient work. It was a titanic effort from our Soulmates and, of course, the help of relatives.
The most “pleasant” surprise awaited us on the eve of the wedding, when they called us and said that they could not provide us with this island. Fortunately, everything was resolved successfully. Although until the last moment we were not entirely sure that we would be allowed to celebrate our wedding there.
In the end, everything turned out perfect!”
Wedding of Misha and Anya
“We began actively preparing for the wedding 3 weeks in advance, during which time it seemed possible to prepare a party on a universal scale. We wanted to have a friendly party, and we didn’t even imagine how much trouble it would be to celebrate a wedding outdoors (“So, we found a coffee machine... What about the ice freezer?”).
“The day before the wedding, we dreamed of rewinding time and changing our minds about celebrating this day in principle! Now we remember our wedding as a real grandiose event! We will be talking about thanks to the organizers and especially to chef Igor for a long time.”
Chef Igor Arsenyev. “In nature, everything can be done exactly the same as in a restaurant, we prepared goat cheese mousse with tiger shrimp, prosciutto rolls with melon, salmon mignons with Mozzarella and Philadelphia cheese, veal medallions in stretch dough and much more.
Obviously, even in places of organized country recreation you cannot find a restaurant convection oven, so when it comes to hot dishes, you need to understand that at a “natural” wedding the emphasis will be on grilled dishes.
The optimal number of guests in this case is 50-70 people.
The price can vary greatly. The advantage of celebrating outdoors is that you can choose the menu based on the amount you are counting on.”
photos by Ivan Sobieski
Locals distributes free of charge the coordinates of organizers of weddings in nature; for any questions, write to
Traditional Moldovan dances
Not a single wedding in Moldova, just like a traditional wedding in Turkey, is complete without national dances. Most often, Moldovan dances at a wedding are accompanied by live music, which creates an even more soulful atmosphere at the celebration. One of the popular dances is the hora - a traditional fiery round dance that guests dance with the newlyweds. Looking at the active and fiery dances, not a single guest can resist starting to dance. Also at Moldovan weddings there may be traditional “Veil Dance”, “Shirt Dance” and “Mask Dance”.
