It was meant to be the happiest day of her life. Instead, Yulia Yukhimets’ wedding ended with her being rushed to the hospital, weak, pale and hooked to an IV – together with nearly 60 guests.
“I have always wanted all of this, but look how it ended,” Yukhimets, 20, a slim and shy blonde, said from her hospital in the town of Ruzhyn, where she was taken in an ambulance from a nearby village this month.
Every year, hundreds of Ukrainian newlyweds and their guests need medical treatment after suffering food poisoning at wedding banquets. They are victims of Ukraine’s cult of traditional big wedding hospitality, which calls for treating guests to more food than they can eat and the hosts can safely prepare. Most often, the poisonings take place because the home-made food at village weddings is not properly refrigerated while it is prepared in huge batches over several days.
Many cultures favor big weddings, but a traditional Ukrainian village wedding is nothing short of a sacred ritual, bringing together the entire community at food-laden tables for song, dance and celebrations that last several days.
Ethnographer Olena Shcherban says that in folk culture, a wedding is considered to be one of the three key events in a person’s life, along with birth and death, and is an occasion for the community to give its official blessing to the new family.