Kukeri (кукери) - Bulgarian mumming

1950

Recurring Bulgarian winter ritual mumming in which masked figures in animal skins and clanging bells go house to house to scare away evil and invoke abundance; in western Bulgaria they are called survakari or babugeri. Origins are often linked to Thracian Dionysian rites but are, in scholars' words, 'too far back to really know'. The year given is the earliest systematic ethnographic study period (from the late 1950s, notably by Petar Petrov), not an origin date.