Votian and ingrian folk songs

Maidens are singing about how they are proudly walking through the village, passing through under each others’ arms. You can sing with your dear friends until your hair is long—hair falling freely down to the waist is a symbol of being unmarried. After the young woman is married, she will be away from her friends. The position of a young married wife is so low in the family that she will not feel herself as beautiful and desirable as she is now.

The beginning of the song refers to the tradition of gulyanie, when girls adorn themselves and gather together durig holidays, walking from one end of the village to another along the main street, catching the villagers’ admiring glances. From time to time, they stop for dancing and circle dances. One of the ways to walk around was holding hands, in procession or in paired procession. Then they walked through under each others’ arms, held up to form gates, a reference to which is made in the first lines of the song. In Narvusi (Kozemkino) area, the faster passing through under the arms was called “the gates of Vironia”, whereas the paired procession was called klutcha. A common refrain of the song is saadu-saadu or saadulmoi, derived from Russian songs (зеленый сад ‘green garden’). The saadulmoi refrain is usually part of the ritual walking through the village, or villages, both during feast days and at weddings.