GALICNIK, MACEDONIA Wedding Festival

By any standard, Galicnik, Macedonia, is tiny. Only two people live year-round in this mountain settlement hidden on the remote Bistra massif about 6 miles east of the Albanian border. During the village’s annual wedding festival — held on the weekend nearest July 12, or St. Peter’s Day for Orthodox Christians — the population explodes. Thousands of travelers and returning countrymen fill the otherwise quiet houses that cling to steep hillsides for a three-day blur of revelry, rites, processions and pageantry culminating with the marriage of a previously selected couple with roots in the settlement.

“The festival started in the 1950s using customs that are centuries old,” said Marko Bekric, the grandson of the only year-round residents. From May to November, Bekric operates cycling and hiking tours in town and helps run the family’s guesthouse and restaurant. “It began so people from the village, who had immigrated or moved away, could come back, get married and continue our traditions. In the early days, dozens of weddings would take place.”

Expected dates for this year’s wedding festival are July 13-15.

When the sun sets on Friday, musicians playing traditional horns and drums — called zurli and tapani — file into a banquet hall-size gazebo of revelers surrounded by horses tethered to rough-sawn fence rails. Platters of grilled meat vie for table space next to trays of beer and bottles of local grappa, called rakija. The rising wall of primal rhythm inspires partyers to mount tables, shout approval and lock arms while waving sparklers. The music also becomes the festival’s constant soundtrack: a calland-response woven from generations of tribal fabric.

A full program of scheduled rituals continues for the next two days — each accompanied by processions of men and women, and girls and boys, in traditional regalia. The men wear thick woolen trousers and tunics. The women wear 60-pound brocaded dresses.. — Alex Crevar