The Jagiellonian Fair
Lublin fairs were well known throughout the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the whole Europe in the 15th -16th centuries. Those fairs were the most famous international trade events. At the time of the greatest development, merchants from the furthest corners of the world met at Lublin fairs. The main trading partners of Lublin always were Lviv, Brest, Volodymyr-Volynsky and other nearby cities. Lublin was the meeting place where trade routes from Hungary to Lithuania, Western Europe to Rus’, the Hanseatic League ports to Turkey crossed.
Today, like many centuries ago, Lublin is still an important meeting place for the West and the East thanks to various international festivals and fairs. The Jagiellonian Fair is the combination of historic traditional fairs with modern cultural and economic exchanges. This year, the Jagiellonian Fair took place in Lublin from 16th to 18th August. The traditional folk art fair with music, dances and songs, entertainments and master classes took place in the heart of the city. This was an extraordinary event that filled Lublin with incredible energy and coloration. Potters, weavers, embroiderers, carpenters, painters were the participants of the fair. All of them are masters who continue family and country traditions. Folk art masters from Poland, Ukraine, Slovakia, Belarus, Lithuania and Hungary were invited to this year’s festival.
Visitors of the Jagiellonian Fair were able to buy beautiful and exclusive handmade products such as straw Christmas decorations, Ukrainian national rag dolls, vytynanky icons (vytynanky are a slavic version of the papercutting, that is very popular in Belarus, Poland and Ukraine), paintings, pottery, women’s amber jewelry and many other various goods. Jagiellonian Fair means concerts of traditional folk music, master classes and huge iron chicken, that was walking through the Old City streets.
Beekeeping was the theme of Jagellonian Fair 2019. There were many beehives and beekeepers’ stalls with different kinds of honey on the Old Town Square. During those days beekeepers were revealing the secrets of the construction of certain species of beehives and the creation of apiary, breeding bees, and production of products based on bee raw materials.
The monks of the Dominican church treated (for a symbolic fee of 10 PLN) everyone who wanted to taste potato dumplings with pork rind and drink cold lemonade. Funds raised by the monks will go for the reconstruction of the church.
Children were also able to take an active part in the Jagellonian Fair. As a part of the Fair there were many different events on the Blonia District and at the shopping mall VIVO. Certainly, tourists and the city residents received a lot of positive emotions at the Jagiellonian Fair in Lublin.
See you there next year!
Photo: jarmarkjagiellonski.pl