The virtues of cabbage weddings

Like most people reaching 40, I've been to many weddings. I've also had the privilege of having friends from many parts of the world, so I've experienced weddings in many different countries, let's see: Canada (6+), US (2), England (20+), France (2), Germany (5+), Austria (1), Italy (1), Serbia (2), Poland (1) with mixtures of people inside (i.e. two Americans marrying in France, an Italian marrying an English person in Sicily, a Croatian-Serb marrying and Bermudan person in Cambridge, etc.), and different social groups: posh English people, middle-class Germans, down-to-earth French people, etc.

Now I love a good wedding, and I've been to many such, but generally the quality from a guests perspective has varied. Some are great fun, some are boring. English people are the drunkest, Italians/French had the best food, German weddings are probably the most organised on average. But the most striking thing I found is just how similar most western weddings are. The people who speak might change, and the clothing varies slightly, but generally the format (church in the afternoon, evening reception), the drinks before (bucks fizz, champagne, campari & soda), the food (some typcial variant of catering), the entertainment (light jazz before dinner, then a band or disco) and even much of the music (eighties classics and the chicken dance) is seemingly universal. There are, of course, exceptions to these, but this is why they are exceptions: outstanding food and unusual entertainment are, for example, merely minor deviations from established wedding norms.

I felt this way, and indeed didn't think much about it until I attended a wedding in Serbia. I didn't know the couple - in fact, G. and I were replacing her parents at a wedding for one of her fathers employees - and couldn't speak Serbian that well, so I was a bit like a puppy looking out the window of a moving car for the first time. But even in my haze of misunderstanding, this wedding was different from the outset.

For starters, the church. This was an Orthodox wedding, and though one could see some similarities, the singing clergy and their outfits certainly stood out - not understanding the service perhaps also gave an air of mystery to the whole thing (old Slavonic as G. later told me, so probably I was not alone). Then the food: cabbage everywhere, very good, but like nothing I had ever had at a wedding, the drink: rakija (šlivovica, kruškovac, etc.) and wine from a Knjaz Miloš bottle (the ubiquitous home-made, often barely drinkable wine that one gets everywhere).

Then, of course, the music. After dinner we were presented with a pretty typical wedding band - cheesy keyboard, singer, bassist, drummer. - the rather bored-looking, sigh-yet-another-wedding, why-aren't-I-a-pop-star type of group that make there living playing at such events. But what they played! There were a few western pop-songs in there - in fact, I think they even played the chicken dance - but for the most part, these were Serbian or Jugoslav songs I had never heard before. And what was more, the people at the wedding both knew and sang along to these songs, and danced to songs (as I said in my last blog) that I could barely understand rhythmically.

Perhaps the most impressive event was when a woman, who owing to her dress (frankly, a bit slutty to my eyes) I presumed to be a band member, got up on stage, on a request from the guests, and absolutely belted out Mala garava - the gypsy song so popular there - to everyone's delight. G. later informed me that she was the sister of the groom.

On the whole this wedding, and other weddings in Serbia I attended, have been true My Big Fat Greek Wedding experiences. By this I mean that for once, there is an immediately discernable, distinct culture, and at least to my mind, this is - despite the shell-suits, arguably too much cabbage, fairly bad wine, sometimes rather grisly venues - a marvelous thing. The strange thing is that some Serbs find these weddings rather savage, and would opt for a more Westernised, chicken-dance wedding instead of a cabbage one. Understandable, in some ways, since whatever is ordinary appears dreary and common. But I think we would lose something if weddings in Serbia morphed into yet another variant of the chicken-dance, cordon-bleu sort of affairs that everybody in the west is pretty tired of. In my mind, the more cabbage, the better.