เครื่องรางมาร์เตนิตซาMartenitsaмартеница

Two rules govern the object, and both are about other people and about time. It is always given, never bought for oneself — to family, friends, anyone you feel close to. And it comes off on a sign, not a date: the wearer takes it off on first seeing a stork, a swallow returning from migration, or a tree in blossom. Failing all three, the end of March.

Baba Marta means Grandma March, and Bulgarian and Macedonian folklore makes her a bad-tempered old woman whose mood turns fast. Wearing her colours is described as asking her for mercy, so that winter passes and spring comes; the first stork or swallow says she is in a good humour and about to retire.

Taking it off has its own local rules. Some tie the martenitsa to the branch of a fruit tree, giving the tree the health and luck the wearer has had while wearing it. Others put it under a stone and look the next day: a larva or a worm means a healthy, successful year; an ant means the same but with hard work for it; a spider means trouble.

On where it comes from, the cited account offers several accounts and settles none. The custom is tied to the pre-Christian history of the Balkans and to agricultural cults of nature; the twisted white-and-red woollen threads specifically are said to suggest Thracian, possibly Hellenic or Roman origins. Some ethnographers trace it to the Eleusinian Mysteries, with the ancient equivalent of the Greek mártis being the kroke; the custom is mentioned in Photios' Lexicon, which records that the priests wrapped a red thread round the right hand and foot. At that time red and other coloured threads were used to protect children and young people from evil spirits and witchcraft. An early twentieth-century Bulgarian story puts the first martenitsa at the seventh-century Battle of Ongal: after the Bulgar victory, Khan Asparuh sent doves with white threads to carry the news, and the threads turned bloody in flight.

Inference — the ethnographers' colour readings are worth quoting rather than choosing between. White for the purity of melting snow, red for the setting sun growing stronger as spring comes; white for purity, red for life and passion; the two together for the cycle of life and death, for good and evil, for sorrow and happiness, for the male and female beginnings and the balance between them. A charm that means that many things at once is a charm doing social work, and the rule that it must be given rather than bought says so out loud.