Meteņi arrives in the grey heart of Latvian February like a deliberately raucous interruption. The snow is still thick, the days are still short, but something underneath the ground is already tensing toward spring, and Meteņi is the festival that gives that tension a voice. It is the Latvian carnival, the last great feast before the land wakes, and it is celebrated with masks, noise, sledding, and a table heavy enough to make winter feel like it has already lost.
What Meteņi celebrates
At its heart Meteņi is a festival of driving out winter and inviting the new year in. The central figures are the budeli or ķekatnieki, masked mummers who go from house to house in procession. Their masks represent spirits, animals, and figures from the edge of the ordinary world - a bear, a death figure, a crane, a straw man - and their visit is understood as a blessing. They bring luck with them, and part of their work is to make enough noise and commotion to shake winter loose from the land.
The festival sits in the folk calendar around seven weeks before Easter, connecting it loosely to the wider European Carnival tradition. But the Latvian form is distinctly its own: the emphasis on agricultural magic, the specific foods, and the sledding custom that ties the length of your downhill run to the height of your summer flax are genuinely local, rooted in a farming culture that read the whole year in February's details.
When Meteņi falls
Meteņi is placed roughly seven weeks before Easter, which means its date shifts a little each year but consistently lands around February 10. The folk calendar treated it as a fixed anchor in the pre-spring sequence - after the midwinter quiet and before the soil stirred. It does not map neatly onto any astronomical marker but follows the older logic of the church calendar's pre-Easter reckoning, embedded so deeply into Latvian custom that the Christian scaffolding largely disappeared and left the festival standing on its own.
In the sequence of the Latvian folk year, Meteņi comes after the winter solstice has quietly passed and before Lieldienas brings the equinox and eggs and swings. It is the carnival, the last permitted excess before the land demands work.
How Meteņi is observed
The mummers are the soul of Meteņi. Groups of people disguise themselves beyond recognition - faces covered, voices changed, movements exaggerated - and travel house to house through the village. Being visited by the budeli is considered good fortune, and households receive them with food, drink, and the quiet understanding that something older than politeness is being transacted. The mummers perform, make noise, and move on.
Sledding is done with genuine agricultural intent built into the fun: go as far as possible, because the distance is the flax. Eating pigs' snouts and trotters is both practical - these are the last of the salted winter pig - and symbolically aligned with the strength and rooting energy that the festival is meant to activate. To feast well at Meteņi is to declare that the household is ready for the year ahead.
Today Meteņi is celebrated in Latvia as a living folk custom, with schools, cultural centres, and families reviving the mummer processions each February. The masks and the sledding and the peas are still there.