In folk tradition, it was revered as the day of the summer solstice[1][2] and was originally celebrated on the shortest night of the year, which is on 21-22[3][4] or 23-24[2] of June in the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Bulgaria (where it is called Enyovden), and modern Ukraine (since 2023),[5].

[1] The celebrations are held near the water, on the hills, surrounding that[clarification needed]; chiefly, young men and women participate in these folkloric traditions.

[19] Whereas, according to Andrzej Kempinski, "The apparent ambivalence (male-female, fire-wood, light-dark) seems to testify to the ancient origins of the holiday alleviating the contradictions of a dual society.

[23] According to ethnographer Vera Sokolova, Kupala is a later name that appeared among Eastern Slavs when the holiday coincided with the day of John the Baptist.

[34] In Belarus, old, unwanted items were collected from backyards throughout the village and taken to a place chosen for the celebration (a glade, a high riverbank), where they were then burned.

This social condemnation can be heard in Ukrainian and Belarusian songs, which contain themes of quarrels between girls and boys or residents of neighboring villages.

[48] In some Russian villages, "votive porridge" was brewed: on St. Juliana's day (June 22), girls would gather to talk and, while singing, pound barley in a mortar.

[50] Among Belarusians, delicacies brought from home were eaten both in separate groups and at potluck and consisted of vareniki, cheese, tvarog, flour porridge (kulaha [ru]), sweet dough (babka) with ground hemp seeds, onion, garlic, bread acid (cold borscht), and eggs in lard.

[51] Songs have preserved mention of the ancient drinks of the night: Will accept you, Kupal’nochka, as a guest, With treating you with green vine, With watering you with wheat beer, With feeding you with quark.

[60] A 16th-century Russian scribe attempted to explain the name (Kupalnica) and the healing power of St. John's Day by referring to the Old Testament legend of Tobias.

As he writes, it was on this day that Tobias bathed in the Tigris, where, on the advice of the archangel Raphael, he discovered a fish whose entrails cured his father of blindness.

[58] The youths would bring down a huge amount of brushwood from all over the village and set up a tall pyramid, with a pole in the middle, on which was placed a wheel, a barrel of tar, a horse or cow skull (Polesia), etc.

According to Tatyana Agapkin and Lyudmila Vinogradova, the symbol of a tall pole with a wheel attached to it generally correlated with the universal image of the world tree.

In various traditions, there is evidence of the requirement to light the Kupala bonfire with "need-fire", produced by friction;[63] in some places, the fire was carried into the house and lit in the earth.

[72] In addition to bonfires, in some places on Kupala Night, wheels and barrels of tar were set on fire, which were then rolled down the mountains or carried on poles, which is clearly related to the symbolism of the solstice.

[73] In Belarus, the Galician Poles and Carpathian Slovaks called baptismal bonfires Sobótki[74] after the West Slavic sobota as a "day of rest".

The ritual use of the Kupala wreath is also related to the magical understanding of its shape, which brings it closer to other round and perforated objects (ring, hoop, loaf, etc.).

"[80] Depending on the region, a young birch, willow, maple, spruce, or the cut top of an apple tree was chosen for the Kupala.

[81] The girls would decorate it with wreaths, field flowers, fruits, ribbons and sometimes candles; then take it outside the village, stick it in the ground in a clearing and dance, walk and sing around it.

[56] Green was used as a universal amulet: it was believed to protect from diseases and epidemics, evil eye and spoilage; from sorcerers and witches, unclean powers, "walking" dead people; from natural lightning, hurricane, fire; from snakes and predatory animals, insect pests, worms.

At the same time, the contact with fresh greens was conceived as a magical means providing fertility and successful breeding of cattle, poultry, yield of cereals and vegetable crops.

[13] It was believed that on the Kupala Night all evil spirits awaken to life and harm people;[92] that one should beware of "the mischief of demons – domovoy, vodyanoy, leshy, rusalky".

On Kupala night, Eastern Slavs would drive scythes, pitchforks, knives and branches of certain trees into the windows and doors of houses and barns, protecting their space from evil spirits.

[96] In Podolia, on St. John's Day, hemp flowers ("porridge") were collected and scattered in front of the entrances to houses and barns to bar the way for witches.

In western Polesia, young people would pull the sails from the fire, run with them as if they were torches, wave them over their heads, and then throw them into the fields "to protect the crops from evil powers.

[101] According to Slavic beliefs, the root of Lythrum salicaria dug up on St. John's Day was able to ward off sorcerers and witches; it could be used to drive demons out of the possessed and possessors.

[106][107] In some parts of Bulgaria, it is believed that at dawn on St. John's Day, three suns appear in the sky, of which only the central one is "ours" and the others are its brothers – shining at other times and over other lands.

[107] The Serbs called John the Baptist Sveti Jovan Igritelj because they believed that on this day the sun stops three times in the sky or plays.

[1] Thus, the message of the hegumen Pamphil [ru] of the Yelizarov Convent (1505) to the Pskov governor and authorities condemned the "pagan" games of Pskov residents on the night of the Nativity of John the Baptist: For when the feast day of the Nativity of Forerunner itself arrives, then on this holy night nearly the entire city runs riot and in the villages they are possessed by drums and flutes and by the strings of the guitars and by every type of unsuitable satanic music, with the clapping of hands and dances, and with the women and the maidens and with the movements of the heads and with the terrible cry from their mouths: all of those songs are devilish and obscene, and curving their backs and leaping and jumping up and down with their legs; and right there do men and youths suffer great temptation, right there do they leer lasciviously in the face of the insolence of the women and the maidens, and there even occurs depravation for married women and perversion for the maidens.

[108] Stoglav (a collection of decisions of the Stoglav Synod of 1551) also condemns the revelry during the Kupala Night, which originated in "Hellenistic" paganism And furthermore many of the children of Orthodox Christians, out of simple ignorance, engage in Hellenic devilish practices, a variety of games and clapping of hands in the cities and in the villages against the festivities of the Nativity of the Great John Prodome; and on the night of that same feast day and for the whole day until night-time, men and women and children in the houses and spread throughout the streets make a ruckus in the water with all types of games and much revelry and with satanic singing and dancing and gusli and in many other unseemly manners and ways, and even in a state of drunkenness.