4 - The meaning of change

Summary

The state of wedding celebrations in Cyprus today stands witness to the transformations that Greek Cypriot society and culture have undergone over the last sixty years. What is no longer practiced is significant. Through absence, it is possible to reconstruct what has happened over this period, what struggles have been fought, who the protagonists and what the stakes were. What currently exists is equally significant. Through presence, one can explore the current state of the Greek Cypriot society and culture, its present visions and divisions, the tensions and contradictions embedded in the new order of things, the dilemmas that it is currently facing. It may seem that this is asking rather too much out of a single celebration. Yet Goffman (1959:45) was surely on target when he declared years ago that, “The world, in truth, is a wedding.”

Of all the changes in weddings over the period under investigation, four are particularly conspicuous. The earliest and most sensational perhaps has been the disappearance of the ritual display of the bride's virginity. Closely associated with it was the drastic shortening of the celebrations to a single day. The third, and seemingly contradictory, development has been an explosion in the number of guests from a few hundred in the 1930s to several thousand. Last, wedding celebrations have been polarized between two distinct and mutually antagonistic types, “village” weddings enacted by the rural population and the urban working class and what I call “champagne” weddings, the celebrations of the Cypriot middle class.