The wedding, or its socio-cultural equivalent, was considered to be the most important social event in all human societies of all time. In traditional European society, everything that related to the creation of a permanent union between a man and a woman in the institution of marriage was endowed with a sacred character and was subject to public scrutiny. The study aims to provide a commented description and to interpret the wedding merriment recorded in the first half of 1990 in Šumice, one of the Czech villages in the Romanian Banat. The first part explains the issue of the ethnic enclave as a subject of ethnological study. It defines the peculiarities of Šumice in the context of the Czech Banat, and it gives an overview of the demographic development of the village. The wedding ritual (veselka) in Šumice is presented from an ethnographic-historical perspective first. The first part of the study was published in the previous, first, issue of Ethnographic Journal 2022.
The wedding, or its socio-cultural equivalent, was considered to be the most important social event in all human societies of all time. In traditional European society, everything that related to the creation of a permanent union between a man and a woman in the institution of marriage was endowed with a sacred character and was subject to public scrutiny. The study aims to provide a commented description and to interpret the wedding merriment recorded in the first half of 1990 in Šumice, one of the Czech villages in the Romanian Banat. The first part explains the issue of the ethnic enclave as a subject of ethnological study. It defines the peculiarities of Šumice in the context of the Czech Banat, and it gives an overview of the demographic development of the village. The wedding ritual (veselka) in Šumice is presented from an ethnographic-historical perspective first. The second part of the study will be published in the next, second, issue of the Ethnographic Journal 2022.