Traditions

New Year in the villages of the Moldavian region of Rumania is a festival on which the Christian tradition has made little impact. The pagan world survives apparently unalloyed, with Dionysian masks and merry-makings, a dance of little horses evoking the races at the Roman hippodromes on the third day of the calends of Janus, and a goat dance in which there are still traces of the Horned God of palaeolithic cave life. A remarkable ethnographic document, enlivened with folklore in the form of traditional New Year rhymed greetings.