Kourbania

Kourbania (το κουρμπάνι, pl. -ια from kurban and ultimately from qurbān, sacrificial rite analogous to Jewish qorban) is a Christianized animal sacrifice in parts of Greece. It usually involves the slaughter of lambs as "kourbania" offerings to saints. In antiquity the sacrifice was offered for health or following an accident or illness, as a votive offering promised to the Lord by the community, or by the relatives of the victim. Writing in 1979, Stella Georgoudi stated that the custom survived in "some villages of modern Greece" and was "slowly deteriorating and dying out". A similar custom from North Macedonia and Bulgaria known as kurban is celebrated on St. George's day. The practice involves the blood sacrifice (θυσία, thusia) of a domestic animal to either a saint, taken as the tutelary of the village in question, or dedicated to the Holy Trinity or the Virgin. The animal is slaughtered outside the village church, during or after the Divine Liturgy, or on the eve of the feast day. The animal is sometimes led into the church before the icon of the saint, or even locked in the church during the night preceding the sacrifice. Most of the kourbania are spread between April and October. The descriptions (for both the Byzantine and Turkish periods) of this θυσία, or kurban (in Turkish), are numerous indeed, and are an example of one popular element which the Turks adopted from Byzantium. The most detailed description is given by the sixteenth-century Turkish slave Bartholomaeus Gourgieuiz: "The Manner of their (the Turks') sacrifice. In the time of anye disease or peril, they promise in certaine places to sacrifice either a Shepe or Oxe; after that the vowed offering is not burned, like unto a beast killed and layed on the aulter, as the custome was among the Jewes, but after that the beast is slaine, the skinne, head, feete, and fourthe parte of the flesh are gene unto the prest, an other part to poore people, and the thirde unto their neighbours. The killers of the sacrifice doo make readye the other fragmentes for the sleves and their compaynions to feede on.