Rice, milk, and sugar: The morning ritual of the biggest Roma holiday
The sweetness of sütlaç on Ederlezi (St. George's Day)
The arrival of spring is among the biggest holidays here in the Balkans. It’s celebrated as St. George’s Day by Christians and as Hıdırellez by Muslims. Here in Bulgaria, we also hold military parades on St. George’s Day as he’s the patron of our army. Similarly in Greece, Albania, Bosnia, Macedonia, Serbia, this is a big day.
And yet, this is not what it’s most known as.
Here in the Balkans, despite military parades and other displays of pride and tradition, St. George’s Day remains the biggest Romani holiday.
What makes it the Romani’s holiday? The tradition has pagan roots and is followed both in the Christian and Muslim world. It did not originate from the Romani, nor do they claim that it did. The customs and rituals followed by the Romani don’t differ much from what other, non-Roma, households do to mark this day.
So what makes this so distinctly a Roma holiday?
When traditions come to life
The care, reverence, and faith that our ancestors infused in traditions centuries ago, still pulse in Roma culture.
In the mainstream world, we slowly let go of certain customs. We save ourselves the time and effort, we “modernize” our holidays. Here in Bulgaria, and especially in big cities such as Sofia, dedication to tradition is seen as “common”, something done in villages. A dead thing.
The Romani, however, have not abandoned their customs - not the ones they’ve brought with them and not the ones they’ve adopted throughout the centuries.
With time, as we “modernized” St. George’s Day, the Romani kept celebrating it with the same vigor as a few generations ago. Gradually, it became known as the biggest Roma holiday. Maybe at some point in the very distant past, the arrival of spring was the biggest holiday for the rest of us too?
The innocence of the lamb
St. George’s Day is celebrated with a sacrifice. A lamb is killed with a swift, precise cut to the throat, washed and prepared, then roasted on a fire and eaten as the main dish. The liver, lungs, and intestines are also washed, cut into small pieces, and cooked with rice.
In modern days, few people actually kill a lamb. We buy lamb meat from the store and cook it - this part has remained a mandatory element of St. George’s Day even in the most modern of households.
But the Romani who still live in so-called “ghettos” - meaning, in small barracks, like a tiny village, isolated from the city around them - they still follow the tradition to its fullest.
“The eldest man in the family does it,” Pepi explains, “for many reasons, one of them being that the cut has to be quick and precise, from an experienced hand. Otherwise, the animal will suffer.”
Across all cultures, the lamb is sacrificed because of its innocence and purity. It only eats “clean food,” it is white and puffy as a cloud, and it is undeserving of the cruelty of the knife and the world around it.
When you have to take care of it, feed it, shelter it, and then cut its throat, cook, and eat it, the meaning of the word “sacrifice” carries more weight. The modern world is detached from this. Eating a lamb on St. George’s Day has become a culinary experience and nothing more.
The Romani, however, treat it with respect and reverence. And they make sure that the most innocent among them - their children - also understand the sacrifice.
The divine sweetness of the sütlaç
The preparations for St. George’s Day start early. A wreath is prepared to put on the lamb’s head, an entire ritual takes place around its sacrifice, then the process of cleaning, preparing, and cooking it takes several hours.
But none of these steps can be taken until the sütlaç is prepared.
Sütlaç is a Turkish word for a very simple but delicious dessert. Boiled white rice with milk and (a lot of) sugar. The Romani call it “the lamb’s lifeforce” or “the lamb’s seed.” Like a lamb, the sütlaç is white and puffy, sweet and divine.
The reason it has to be prepared early, before everything else, is for it to be ready when the children wake up. It has to be the very first thing they eat on St. George’s Day.
“They have to know the lamb’s sacrifice,” says Pepi.
Roma children grow up with this ritual. When they wake up on St. George’s Day, they run to the kitchen just like children everywhere run to the Christmas tree when they wake up on Christmas - they know that this divinely delicious and sweet breakfast awaits them. And they know the symbolism. They know it means that in a few hours, a being this sweet and divine will be sacrificed for their health and the health of everyone they love.
A recipe from Pepi
When we first moved in together, Pepi woke up on St. George’s Day and prepared a huge pot of sütlaç. The two of us weren’t able to eat all of it, of course. He was following his habit of cooking in large quantities. Back in the Roma quarters, he’d cook a big pot of sütlaç and hand it out in small cups to his own children and the children of families who haven’t been able to afford groceries. Naturally, even kids from families who had prepared their own sütlaç knew to run to Uncle Pepi’s house in the morning after they’d had their first breakfast at home. Some of them did the same on the first St. George’s Day he didn’t wake up in the Roma tribe: they caught the bus and were at our door just before noon.
He follows this tradition like clockwork. Today, he was up at 05:00 am, thirty minutes earlier than usual, so he could make the sütlaç before he went to work. “Make sure Elena eats some first, before anything else,” he told Martina about our daughter who was still a baby on last year’s St. George’s Day, and now, for the first time, can enjoy sütlaç as it was intended.
In Bulgarian households, this dish is cooked by first boiling the rice until it’s half ready, then adding milk and boiling it until it’s fully cooked, and then adding the sugar and boiling it some more. This makes for a delicious dessert with a very thick texture.
The Romani, at least in Pepi’s tribe, cook it in a slightly different way. First, you cook the rice but not until it is completely soft. It has to retain its shape. “You have to know you’re eating rice,” says Pepi. Then you heat up the milk and add it to the rice but you don’t boil them together. And then, you add the sugar. The result looks like this:
Whichever way you prefer to enjoy a sütlaç, we hope you try it and experience a moment of sweetness as we all welcome spring and new life on today’s Ederlezi.
I love sweet rice. It's such a comfort ❤️