Traditional Turkmen Wedding

туркменская свадьба

The national culture has always been famous for its great variety of various traditions and customs that have preserved their original beauty. One of these customs is the traditional Turkmen wedding. Ethnographers note that in this ritual, absolutely every element plays a symbolic role. Even the slightest deviation from the ancient canons can cause the wrath of higher powers, who will not help the young family.

If you want to see this ceremony yourself, then you will have to go to small towns where people more carefully preserve the traditions of antiquity. In the capital and large regional centers, where Turkmen airlines bring hundreds of tourists, people increasingly prefer modern wedding traditions.

 

Preparing for a wedding ceremony

Turkmens firmly believe that a wedding must be held at a strictly defined time. The same can be said about the various stages of a traditional wedding:

  • Matchmaking;
  • Conspiracy;
  • Procession for the bride;
  • The bride leaving her parents’ house;
  • The future wife arrives at her betrothed’s house.

 

Another important moment of the wedding ceremony is the national scarf, which is used for various purposes:

  • Decorating the wedding procession;
  • Decorating the ceremony venue;
  • Wrapping up the gifts brought, etc.

 

And a good scarf itself could be an excellent gift for a future wife. The headscarf also played the role of the most valuable prize in competitions for the heart of a beauty. Nowadays, the use of a headscarf as an important element of a wedding ceremony has undergone minor changes. If the ancestors of the Turkmen preferred exclusively woven headscarves, the modern generation prefers to buy them. Separately, the parents of the young prepare small colored scraps, which act as a gift for the guests who came to the wedding.

 

Features of wedding attire

At the wedding, the bride and groom were required to wear only clothes sewn by relatives. Strictly defined days were chosen for the selection of materials, cutting and subsequent sewing. Otherwise, it was believed that adversity would await the future couple. In order to cut the bride’s dress, they took the fabric brought by the groom’s parents. The bridesmaids carried the resulting fabric to the bride’s house, where they cut it. The most respectable elderly lady in the village supervised this process. If during this process even the smallest scraps remained, they were collected as a talisman for good luck. The wedding dress was complemented by all sorts of decorations that had a mystical meaning, not to mention the way they were applied to the clothes.

 

Conducting a wedding ceremony

Regardless of whether you bought last-minute tours to Turkmenistan or came here on a business trip, be sure to attend a traditional wedding. On the first day of the wedding, there are treats at the house of the bride’s parents, and then the wife lives with her father until the groom pays the full amount of the kalym. After this, the mother-in-law dresses her daughter-in-law in a special robe. The bride’s hairstyle is also subject to change.

 

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