Carnival Selce

The importance of Carnival to the people of Selce is testified to by the fact that since its beginnings more than a hundred years ago, local carnival tradition has remained unchanged. Carnival in Selce is distinguished by the fact that on three Thursdays in a row, groups of majorettes and musicians hold a procession across the town. Three weeks before that, there is a tradition that young single men "steal" things from young girls' courtyards and take them to the town market, where the girls' fathers collect them the next day. On Mondays, there was a habit of single young men singing to unmarried girls to the accompaniment of an accordion. Until the 1960s, masked balls would take place on Saturdays in the local cultural centre, then in the town's hotels, and from 2010 in the cultural centre again. The Mesopust, a straw figure that is blamed for everything that went wrong in the previous year, is made on the last Saturday and displayed in public after Sunday Mass. There is a tradition that if the Mesopust gets stolen before being presented to the public, there must be no Carnival for the next seven years. Shrove Tuesday is the last day of Carnival. In the afternoon, local people start their procession to the Church of St. Joseph and down to the waterfront. The procession ends at the town market, where according to tradition local women thresh the straw, burn it, and then dance two traditional dances: the Hrvacki and Kolunati. During the dance, local people observe with anxiety which direction the smoke of the burning straw takes. Should the smoke blow towards the sea, it will be a good year for fishing, and if it blows inland, it will be a fertile year on land. In the end, people dance the local circle dance called Selačko kolo. In the past, there would also have been a wedding procession, in which men and women would swap roles. On Ash Wednesday, people read out "The Sentence" and pass judgement on the Mesopust, after which this figure is set on fire and thrown into the sea.