Kukeri: An Ancient Bulgarian Ritual for Chasing Away Evil Spirits

The kukeri games are an ancient and spectacular Bulgarian tradition. For centuries, at the beginning of every year, groups of men in Bulgaria’s villages put on scary costumes, strap on belts with strings of cowbells, and perform a magical dance to scare away evil spirits and bring a good year with abundant crops.

Although most of Bulgaria’s population today lives in cities and doesn’t tend to land, the kukeri tradition lives on in a few villages in both Western and Eastern Bulgaria. Every January, the Bulgarian city of Pernik hosts the world’s largest kukeri games – the Surva Festival – where kukeri groups from all over the country, as well as from abroad, demonstrate their magnificent costumes and masks.

The kukeri dance is not something one can easily forget – their colorful clothes, sometimes ripped to rags, their giant masks with feathers, beads, horns and fur, and the sound of hundreds and hundreds of cowbells, ringing away. But, as scary the kukeri may look, they don’t scare people, or even children, who come out in droves to watch them dance, drawn by their lavish look but also by the hope and optimism for the new year that the kukeri tradition is all about.