Why September 29 does not kiss loved ones and what will happen to the violator of the ban

On September 29, the Orthodox Church honors the memory of the Great Martyr Euphemia the All-Praiseful, who lived in the IV century in Chalcedon. According to life, a young Christian woman was arrested for refusing to participate in a pagan holiday, tortured and thrown to wild animals. The beasts gravitated towards her, and only one bear inflicted a wound - after which a voice sounded from the sky calling Euphemia to himself. At the time of her death, an earthquake struck the city, destroying pagan temples.

On the same day they remember the martyr Lyudmila, the Princess of the Czech Republic – the first Czech saint, the grandmother of St. Wenceslas. In the people, the day received three names at once: Lyudmilin Day, Ethymia and Bird Bone. The latter is the most mysterious and the most telling.

The name "Bird bone" was born from an ancient tradition. On September 29, peasants caught deaf and ducks in the forest, baked the bird and after a meal guessed its bones. If the bone was thick and covered with fat, they waited for a fierce frosty winter. A thin, dry bone foreshadowed a warm and short winter with early spring. It was the most accessible and, as people believed, the surest way to predict the weather for months to come.

There are so many bans on this day that it is time to tiptoe. But behind each is a specific belief - and frighteningly logical.

Not everything in Bird's Bone was forbidden. There were good customs, and some still make sense today.

Our ancestors were more attentive to nature - and on September 29 could predict winter with an accuracy that any weather forecaster would envy.