Surva — the masquerade games

Surva gathers the kukeri tradition into one place: over two January weekends, hundreds of bands and thousands of masked figures from across Bulgaria and the wider Balkans process through Pernik. The kukeri costume is a feat of village craft — a carved wooden mask towering above the wearer's head, hung with horns, mirrors, beads and feathers, over a suit of long-haired animal hide, and around the waist a girdle of large bronze or copper bells. The dancers move with a deliberate, weighted stamp that swings the bells in unison; the sound of a whole band at close range is physical, and the sound of thousands filling a Balkan street is the entire point. The figures act out the chasing of evil spirits and the waking of the land, and within the bands you find recurring characters — the bride, the bear and its leader, the tax-collector, the elder — playing out small fertility and renewal dramas. The masks are not bought but inherited and remade; mask-carving is a living craft passed within families, and a man's first turn under the bells is a coming of age. UNESCO inscribed the Pernik 'Surova' feast in 2015. What began as a midwinter village rite is now also a competition and a meeting of traditions, but at street level it remains what it always was: noise made deliberately, to push the dark season out.