Harvest bouquet

The harvest bouquets concocted by harvesters are more or less complex assemblies of ears of wheat. Traditionally, these were exhibited at church during the harvest mass or were offered to the lady of the house who prepared the meal for the harvesters that closed out that laborious work. Sometimes attached to barn doors, the bouquet could serve as a protective symbol for the harvest.

During the Communist era in Poland, the land was not collectivized and harvest festivals in some cases persisted. Highly popular today, these festivities illustrate the osmosis of a religious celebration with a jolly secular party. The bouquets have become sophisticated constructions for which competitions are held throughout the country. This bouquet was inspired by motifs taken from an almanac: altar and monstrance, bread, dried flowers and clusters of grapes. It took a group of neighbours one month to create. The bouquet took first prize at the 2013 harvest bouquet competition in Lubaczów. Now, at the end of the competitions, the bouquets are most often destroyed and they are no longer seen as having any protective value. All that matters are the aesthetics and the sense of solidarity between friends and neighbours.