Andjelka, our cousin, got married the other day. Every good Croatian wedding needs several things.

1. Cars with horns blaring. Saturday is wedding day in Croatia, and weddings are not quiet events. The racket starts when the towns are filled with lines of cars, all with horns blasting, traveling from the grooms’ houses to the brides’ houses – where the grooms have to buy the brides from their families – before they all move on to the church.

Andjelka skipped this bit as the service took place in Trogir, a small medieval town with pedestrian-friendly narrow streets. Trogir is situated on a small island between the Croatian mainland and the island of Čiovo, about 27kms west of Split, and since 1997 it has been included in the UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

2. Flag. The lead car always has a large Croatian flag flying from it. (No one seems to know where the tradition of having a flag at the front of the procession comes from.)

3. Band.Whenever there is a wedding (or any type of festival) in Dalmatia the folk band is dusted off and sings in front of the church, before and after the service.

The video above shows Tomislav Ivčić singing a Dalmatian party favourite “Večeras je Naša Fešta”at the 1986 Split Summer Festival. From the looks of it, he could do a mean Borat impersonation as well.

4. Pregnant bride. At about 80% of Dalmatian weddings the bride’s father is seen prodding the groom down the aisle with a shotgun. Thanks to the Catholic Church’s excellent safe-sex program many young kids are married in their late-teens or early-twenties – all so the Church will accept the expected baby. We saw three weddings one Saturday in Korčula – all teenage brides were 8 months gone. Andjelka, happily, was not in the family-way!

5. Flares. In front of the church, after the service, you could be mistaken that you stumbled upon a local soccer match. Croatians love to light a good flare, and the more the better.

6. Lots of food. Food is at the centre of every Croatian get-together. At the reception you are still being served food at 5am – pršut, cheese, black risotto or roast lamb.

Andjelka had her wedding at one of Croatia’s most interesting churches – the Cathedral of St. Lawrence (Sv. Lovre). The building of the cathedral started around 1200 and was finally finished in 1589, when the last storey of the bell tower was completed. (The bell-tower took so long to build that spanned four architectural styles – Romanesque, early and late Gothic, Renaissance and Mannerist.)

The west portal of Trogir cathedral is known as Radovan’s Portal after the master sculptor who carved his name on it in 1240. It is covered with sculptures of some one hundred figures. A series of reliefs with scenes from Jesus’s life, from the Annunciation to the Resurrection, occupy the concentric arches above the door. Adam and Eve, the Original Sinners, were placed on lions that flank the entrance.

The portal was completed during a period when Bogomilism was prevalent in Dalmatia, after it crossed over from Bosnia and Bulgaria at the end of the 12th Century. The Bogomils opposed the existence of a church as a fixed organization; they were also against the church possessing property and leveling compulsory tithes. The original Bogomil teaching preached disobedience to rulers and masters.

Bogomils explained the corporeal life as a creation of Satan, an angel that was sent to the Earth. Due to this duality, their doctrine rejects everything that is socially created and that does not come from the soul, the only divine possession of the human. Therefore, the established Church, the state, and the hierarchy is totally undermined by Bogomilism. That is why its followers refused to pay taxes, to work, or to fight for their state. The whole social system was to be overthrown.

They denied the divine birth of Jesus; refused all veneration to Mary; the miracles performed by Jesus were interpreted in a spiritual sense, not as real material occurrences; they had no special priests; prayers were to be said in private houses, not in separate buildings such as churches; they declared Jesus to be the Son of God only through grace like other prophets; they believed that the bread and wine of the eucharist were not transformed into flesh and blood, and icons and the cross were idols and the veneration of saints and relics idolatry.

The Bogomils were the revolutionaries that laid the foundations of Protestanism – so the Church tried to squash them!

The portal is influenced by them – it is orientated towards the more humane side of the Church – the Nativity instead of the Last Judgement.

So why is this interesting. Well, the name of the movement was bulgarus in Latin (meaning “Bulgarian”). It became bougre in Old French meaning “heretic, traitor”. It entered German as Buger meaning “peasant, blockhead” (and went on to English as bugger) and the French term also entered Old Italian as buggero and Spanish as bujarrón, both meaning “sodomite”, since it was supposed that heretics would approach sex (just like everything else) in an “inverse” way. The word in Venetian Italian became buzerar, meaning “to do sodomy”. So next time you say “Oh, bugger” you know where the it came from.

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