The Cypriot Wedding

By Blanca Garcia

The traditional Cypriot wedding is nowadays somewhat of an endangered species. If you happen to witness one, it can be a real treat and a memorable experience.

Even though a lot of the wedding’s traditions have been lost or relaxed, you can still enjoy many of the original rituals when attending a village wedding.

The Ceremony

Most couples marry in the summer months and leap years are avoided because they are considered unlucky. The celebration begins with the dressing of the bride and groom usually to a musical accompaniment. Then it is off to church, the time of the ceremony depending on the number of other weddings taking place that day. The guests attending the one-hour-long ceremony are usually too numerous to fit inside the church.

The Celebration

Afterwards, the festivities begin with the "making of the bed", the symbolic setting up and decoration of a mattress: married women carrying the future couple's bedclothes dance around the mattress and make the bed. Guests then decorate the finished bed with coins and banknotes.

Each guest is then offered a drink and a plate piled high with the wedding meal. This traditionally includes a range of set dishes: fried slices of potato, cucumber, tomatoes, kleftiko (lamb roasted in a sealed oven or sealed earthenware pot) and pastitsio. Women carrying large bowls distribute resi (crushed wheat porridge), and kourabiedes (baked almond pastries).

At this point the dancing starts, and lasts until about midnight: there is the tsifteteli, a simplified form of the belly dance, which men and women do separately in pairs, or the rembetiko, a dance in which a single individual performs to the syncopated clapping of a circle of friends.

Depending on the size of the orchestra, instruments usually include the bouzouki, the electric guitar, drums and - replacing the bouzouki and the guitar in traditional wedding music - the violin. The repertoire tends to be similar to that employed at most other festivals and in the bouzouki nightclubs; the latest "hits" are essential.

Once the evening is quite far advanced, it is time for the choros tou androjinou (couple’s dance), danced only by the bridal couple. This is when the guests shower money on the bride and groom. The couple literally disappear under long chains of banknotes, all pinned together to the bride’s wedding gown.

Finally, towards midnight, the guests disperse.

The Guest List

The wedding guest list is nowadays somewhat of a controversial subject in Cyprus. Traditionally the entire village was invited to a couple's wedding, making the ceremony a community celebration and also a way for the couple to start their life on a positive financial note, as all of the guests offered cash as gifts. In fact, the traditional "money dance" was the medium for this to happen, with the couple dancing and the guests getting up and pinning money on their clothes.

Nowadays, with western influences and the closely-tied community bonds relaxing, the shrinkage of the guest-list was an inevitable outcome, more noticeable in weddings of couples who have been educated abroad and living in the city. Still, old habits die hard and a "small" wedding in Cyprus can mean 200-300 guests, with larger weddings many times exceeding 2,000 guests.