The truth: courtship orgy with spanking

Lent in Ireland – time of ancient rites and traditions. For example, if you want to get married quickly, you have to go to the island in front of the island.

For every Irish problem there is an Irish solution. Lent also began in Ireland last Wednesday: 40 days during which carnal desires of all kinds must be suppressed. Because eggs, milk and butter are also forbidden, “Pancake Tuesday” was invented. By the evening before Ash Wednesday everything has to be used up, so pancakes are fried in butter with lots of eggs and milk.

In the past, many married quickly because it was not possible during Lent. Those who remained unmarried were reviled with mean poems, which were distributed on notices in the village, because these people were considered a danger to the continued existence of mankind because of their childlessness. An oil painting by James Beale from 1845 shows what it was like back then: single people were carried to a horse trough on donkeys and in wheelbarrows and thrown into the deep end.

This tradition had long survived in a milder form in County Cork in southern Ireland, until the local school board ordered girls’ schools to close an hour earlier than boys’ schools, giving the girls a head start and getting home safely, without being tied to a tree by the boys and being watered with buckets of water.

A document from 1895 states that “all young people of marriageable age” who had not married by the evening before Ash Wednesday had to go to the monastery complex on the island of Skellig Michael. However, this originally religious custom quickly degenerated into a courtship orgy with lots of alcohol and fights. The day was soon called “Skelliking Day” and was a kind of Irish carnival.

The medieval monastery complex on the rock island, around twelve kilometers off the coast of southwest Ireland in the Atlantic, where parts of the “Star Wars” films were shot, is a World Heritage Site. The monks who founded the monastery in 588 built beehive huts, two boat-shaped prayer rooms and a stone stairway with 600 steps without railings to the sea. They mainly fed on puffins. Thanks to a trick, they could also be eaten on Fridays and during Lent, because the birds only fed on fish, which is why the monks declared them to be fish too.

The monks also laid the groundwork for solving another Irish problem. While Ireland adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, Skellig stuck to the Julian calendar, so Lent began later. For some sinners, the time difference was a blessing in the truest sense of the word. If a single woman became pregnant and the matter could not be hushed up by Easter, she still had reprieve to marry on Skellig with a church blessing.

The truth on taz.de