page_title: Macedonian Blood Wedding
section_title: Elements
hierarchical_section_title: Macedonian Blood Wedding / Elements
caption_attribution_description: English: Makedonska Karvava Svatba Postcard
context_page_description: Macedonian Blood Wedding is a play by the Bulgarian publicist Voydan Chernodrinski, first published and shown in theaters in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1900. The drama was written in the Macedonian Debar dialect, making it one of the first books written in a Macedonian dialect.
  The play tells the story of a young woman Cveta who is kidnapped by the bey who rules the fictional village Stradalovo. It follows her resistance to be converted to Islam and to renounce her identity along with the parallel revolt of the locals against the Ottomans and their mistreatment of the local population. Chernodrinski was inspired to write the play after he read a real-life story of a girl from Valandovo who was kidnapped from the fields by an Ottoman agha.
  Today, in North Macedonia Macedonian Blood Wedding is considered one of the most important works in Macedonian literature. It has received numerous stage adaptations, and has been adapted in Bulgaria as an opera in 1924, in Yugoslavia as a movie in 1967, and in North Macedonia as a musical in 2012. The play is also considered part of the history of Bulgarian theater.
context_section_description: Typical of Chernodrinski's work is the frequent use of folklore elements in his literary work. In Macedonian Blood Wedding, folklore songs are used during scenes of villagers working and during Cveta and Spase's wedding. Some of the topics of the songs are love, the everyday life and customs of the villagers and robberies committed by the Turks. According to scholars Tole Belchev and Ranko Mladenovski from the Goce Delčev University of Štip, the inclusion of these songs makes the literary work similar to an antique tragedy, and they saw the songs included as a replacement of the choir. Scholars in North Macedonia also point that the play's main topic is "the hard and unbearable position of Macedonians under Turkish rule" in the last years of Ottoman rule in the region of Macedonia.
  At the beginning of the play, a snake is used as a foreboding sign for the arrival of the evil, namely Osman Bey. Other symbols used in the play are the names of geographical places and characters. Namely, the village Stradalovo is derived from the word for suffering, which implies the sufferings of the villagers who live there. Spase's name comes from the word "spas" for "saving" and "savior" as he is the one who saves Cveta from the Bey. According to Belchev and Mladenovski, Osman Bey's character resembles other folklore stories in which the female protagonist is typically kidnapped by a dragon.
caption: A postcard from the early 20th century, depicting the first scene from the play.
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