the night when bears, goats and monsters dance together

There is a night of the year where all the beasts of creation come together to celebrate the year to come. It is a night of joy and terror like a Dionysian dream. Deaths and resurrections take turns and Christianity blends with the wildest paganism in a ghostly post-Christmas carnival. The village’s church forecourt hosts the irreverent chants of the monsters after the morning mass, while the believers toast the colorful mascaţii (the masks) and their ritual itinerant dances until the noisy door-to-door pilgrimage ends into the night. This ongoing long-term project started in 2021 to document how rural communities in the Romanian Moldavia keep their winter folklore alive and hand it down from one generation to another.