Hello to everyone! The celebration of Epiphany is over, and the season of winter church wedding ceremonies starts. From the beginning of Epiphany till the beginning of the Great Lent before the Easter all who wish can get married in the Church. But the long, more pagan tradition exists here – Epiphany counts down the Fortune Foretelling period of time for young, beautiful and single Ukrainian ladies. In other words, all who want to know about their future husbands would ask the fate and try their fortune.

Who will be my betrothed? What is his name? What does he look like? These and other questions the young ladies want to know. Fortune foretelling for a husband was considered to be one of the oldest Slavic traditions. Single either town or country ladies had all been impatiently expecting for the beginning of “foretelling time”, as they all hoped to know about their future. It should be noted that the main purpose of such predictions was to foretell the future of a beautiful single lady; especially it concerned prospects for a wealthy and happy marriage. That is why such foretelling was considered to be a rather harmless and kind. Bad and unhappy predicts should be mostly ignored thus.

There is a lot of favorite guessing for a husband in Ukraine. One of them is the well-known “shoe prediction”. Young ladies came out into the street, took their shoes off and threw it over the left shoulder through the inn-yard gates. The shoe sock was believed to indicate the location of the betrothed. Another local variant of this guessing was that the shoe had to toss the male passers-by. According to the uttered words the ladies concluded the possibility of the marriage (hey, guys, what would you say if someone suddenly throw his shoe to you?). However, clever men took up posts at the yard gates for the ladies’ shoes previously remembered. Quite a bizarre guessing, isn’t it? There are a lot of other predictions, among them foretelling by candle wax, when ladies melt candle wax and poured it into a bowl of cold water, then consider the results of wax shapes (it definitely looks like the European New Year “Lead pouring” Custom when a small amount of lead is melted in a tablespoon and then poured into a bowl water, and then the results are interpreted to predict the next year).