Everything you need to know about the balkan way of celebrating The New Year! (legend, traditions, food)

My wife Zoe spent a lot of time in the Pernik region of Bulgaria, where every January the streets fill with men in fur costumes the size of a small car, wearing bells you can hear from three streets away. I spent my childhood in Maramureș, in northern Romania, where a wooden goat with a snapping jaw used to show up at our door on New Year’s Eve, trailed by musicians, expecting brandy in exchange for a blessing. Neither tradition has much to do with fireworks or countdown parties, which is part of why we built Balkan Trails around them: travel that goes beyond the checklist usually means showing up for something that wasn’t designed with visitors in mind.

Every December, people ask whether Christmas or New Year’s is the better time to visit. Our answer is New Year’s, almost every time – not because the parties are bigger, but because this is when the oldest layer of both cultures comes out into the street. The masks, the noise, the specific foods, the door-to-door blessings: none of it was invented for tourists, and some of it predates Christianity in the region. It survived because villages kept doing it whether or not anyone outside was watching.

Romania’s version and Bulgaria’s version look different on the surface but solve the same problem: how do you drive out whatever bad luck followed you through the old year, and how do you talk the new one into being generous? Below is what actually happens in each country, where to see it in person, and what’s changed since most articles on this topic were written – starting with the fact that Bulgaria spent this New Year’s Eve saying goodbye to a currency it had used for more than a century. More on that shortly.

Romania: legends, rituals, and feasts

Romanians treat New Year’s Eve like a countryside pageant crossed with a street party. Wherever you are, you’ll hear it before you see it – bells, whips cracking, someone working a fluier (a traditional wooden flute). Three customs carry most of the weight: the goat, the plow, and, in a couple of specific towns, the bears.

Capra, the dancing goat

One of Romania’s most recognizable New Year customs is Capra, the dancing goat. It’s a wooden goat head with a hinged jaw the performer snaps in time with the music, mounted on a pole under a costume of fabric, ribbons, bells, and beads. A small band, usually a fluier and a drum, follows the goat house to house, and it dances outside each doorway until the household hands over coins, a slice of cozonac, or a glass of țuică. In Romanian folklore, goats are seen as lucky troublemakers – useful for chasing off whatever’s been lingering around the house since last winter.

The custom is strongest in Moldavia and Maramureș. Stay in a village in either region between December 30th and January 1st and you won’t need to look for it – it will find you. In cities, the closest most visitors get is a staged hotel-dinner version – fine as an introduction, not the same as watching a troupe work an actual street.

The bear dance (Ursul)

Less known outside Romania, and to my mind more striking than the goat, is Ursul – the bear dance. The place to see it is Comănești, a town in Bacău county, Moldavia, where the Parada Urșilor (Bear Parade) has run every December 30th since the late 1960s as the centerpiece of the town’s Festivalul de Datini și Obiceiuri Strămoșești. Dancers wear real or synthetic bear pelts and perform a heavy, rolling dance meant to show the animal waking from hibernation and shaking off the old year. Families in the area train for months, and joining a local ceată (troupe) is treated as a genuine, often inherited honor. The event has drawn coverage from National Geographic and the New York Times, and pulls thousands of visitors into an otherwise unremarkable town.

If you can only build a trip around one masked performance in Romania, I’d point you to Comănești over any goat dance. It’s louder, stranger, and the town hasn’t smoothed it into a polished show for outsiders.

Plugușorul, the little plow

On New Year’s Eve, Romanians also perform Plugușorul – “the little plow” – rooted in old agrarian life, when the plow stood for hard work and a good harvest. Groups of young men in traditional dress carry a small decorated wooden plow door to door, reciting long rhymed verses that wish the household wealth and a strong harvest ahead. The traditional opening line is “Aho, aho, copii și frați” – roughly, “hey, hey, children and brothers” – the cue that the recitation is about to start. Cowbells clang and whips crack for effect – loud, long, and, after a few verses, genuinely funny.

Where to see everything in one afternoon

If you don’t have village connections and can’t just wander into someone’s New Year’s, the fix is the Festivalul de Datini și Obiceiuri de Iarnă “Marmația,” held every year on December 27th in Sighetu Marmației, the main town of Maramureș. It has run continuously since 1969 and brings together carolers, goat and bear troupes, and masked performers in devil and animal costumes from across Maramureș, parading through the town center before an open-air stage. It’s free, outdoors, and instead of one twenty-minute custom outside a single house, you get an entire afternoon of troupes back to back. For more on the wider area, see our guide to Maramureș and Bucovina.

The trade-off: it’s also the most organized version of these customs anywhere in Romania, sponsors and printed schedule included. For something rawer, catch a village on the night of December 31st itself.

A feast built to last

No Romanian New Year’s table skips a proper feast – the dishes are built to survive several days of family visits.

Sarmale comes first: sour cabbage leaves rolled around pork, rice, and dill, then slow-cooked for hours in a tomato sauce until the cabbage falls apart at the fork. Properly made sarmale takes the better part of a day, which is why families make dozens at once and eat them all week.

Cozonac, a sweet swirled bread filled with walnut, cocoa, or raisin, gets baked days ahead, and most families still argue over whose recipe is the correct one. Some bakers hide a coin inside a loaf – whoever finds it in their slice is supposed to have the luckiest year at the table.

Piftie – pork jelly made by boiling pig’s feet and ears for hours until the broth sets as it cools – is the dish most first-time visitors hesitate over on sight, and get used to fast with garlic and vinegar. Boeuf salad, a cold mix of boiled beef, potatoes, carrots, and mayonnaise, finished with egg and olives, rounds out the table beside a bottle of țuică poured more generously as the night goes on.

At midnight, fireworks go up over squares and riverbanks across the country – nothing unique to Romania, but still the one moment an entire town looks at the same thing. Two superstitions are hard to avoid afterward: wearing something new on New Year’s Eve for a clean start, and eating twelve grapes at midnight, one wish per grape, one grape for each month of the coming year.

If you want to see it yourself

A few practical notes. Comănești, in Bacău county, is about 40 minutes by car from Bacău’s airport; a slow branch rail line also runs there, but driving is easier. Sighetu Marmației is further off the network – the closest airport is Baia Mare, an hour away by road, and CFR Călători trains from Cluj-Napoca usually involve a change and five to six hours total; check current timetables before booking, since routes shift yearly. Roads into Maramureș and Moldavia can ice over by late December – Romanian law requires winter tires or chains on any snow-covered road between November 1st and March 31st. Watching any of this costs nothing beyond food, a room, and coins for the performers, but book accommodation in both towns well ahead of December 27th and 30th – they’re small and fill up fast on those exact dates.

This same window also opens most of Romania’s ski season. If half your group wants slopes and half wants folklore, our guide to where to ski in Romania and Bulgaria covers how to split the difference.

Bulgaria: masks, blessings, and a new currency

A part of the Zoe’s family is from the Pernik region, ground zero for Bulgaria’s Kukeri tradition, so most of what follows comes from decades of her family’s New Year’s tables – plus one unusual addition from this particular year.

New Year’s Eve: the speech, the countdown, and (for once) two currencies

Bulgarians follow a fairly consistent script on December 31st: a presidential TV address minutes before midnight, the national anthem at twelve, champagne, and the greetings Chestita nova godina (“happy New Year”) or Za mnogo godini (roughly, “here’s to many more years”). Sofia’s biggest public countdown happens in front of NDK, the National Palace of Culture.

This year’s countdown carried extra weight. At midnight on December 31st, 2025, Bulgaria became the 21st country to adopt the euro, retiring the lev after more than a century of use. The rate was fixed at 1.95583 lev to the euro, the same peg it had held for years, and the two currencies circulated side by side through January before the lev lost legal-tender status in February 2026. If you’re visiting for a future New Year’s, plan on prices in euros; anyone still quoting lev is either being sentimental or hasn’t updated their price list.

Survakane

On the morning of January 1st, children carrying a decorated dogwood branch called a survachka go house to house, tapping relatives lightly on the back while reciting a rhymed blessing for health and a good harvest, then collecting coins or sweets in return. The branch is traditionally bent into the shape of the Cyrillic letter Ф and hung with popcorn, dried fruit, wool thread, and a coin at the top – each item stands for a specific wish, from grain to money. Zoe’s mother still sets aside fresh-cut cornel branches every December just for this.

It’s one of the few Bulgarian customs a visiting family can actually take part in rather than just watch. If you’re staying with a host family or in a village guesthouse over New Year’s, ask whether the children will be out survakane-ing that morning, and don’t be surprised if you get tapped too.

The other New Year

Here’s something most articles skip: Bulgaria effectively has two New Year’s – January 1st is the modern one. January 13th-14th is “Stara Nova Godina” (Old New Year), based on the Julian calendar Bulgaria used before 1916, and it’s when the older village masquerade rituals – including the Surova custom that gave the Pernik region’s Kukeri their name – traditionally take place. In villages around Pernik, groups of survakari (young men in masks, distinct from the children’s survakane) go door to door on the night of January 13th performing much the same blessing ritual, just louder and stranger.

This matters for planning, because the large touristic event – the Surva International Festival of Masquerade Games in Pernik – doesn’t always land on those exact Old New Year dates. It runs on its own schedule, usually a weekend or two later in the month; the 2026 edition ran January 16th to 25th. Confirm the current year’s dates on the festival’s own listings before booking, since they move.

Banitsa with fortunes

Everyday banitsa – layers of filo and cheese – is a staple in Bulgaria, but the New Year’s version hides small rolled paper fortunes, torn open at the table to reveal what’s coming. Traditional fortunes reference health, a new home, marriage, or travel, though Zoe’s family has started slipping in jokes about as often as real predictions.

Church

Plenty of Bulgarian families also go to church on New Year’s Eve or early on January 1st, praying for health and a good year ahead – less spectacle than the masked processions, but a genuine, common part of the holiday, not a tourist add-on.

A table with a strict order

Bulgarians take feasting seriously, and the New Year’s table is where that shows most clearly. Four dishes tend to define the spread, from the slow-cooked stew that opens the meal to the pastry that closes it.

Kapama leads it in households that still make it properly – layers of pork, chicken, or veal with rice and sauerkraut, cooked for hours in a clay pot until the flavors stop being separable. Roast pork with sauerkraut is the more common modern default, seasoned heavily with paprika and garlic.

Shkembe chorba, tripe soup, isn’t strictly a New Year’s dish, but it shows up constantly on January 1st and 2nd for a specific reason: it’s the standard hangover cure, heavy on vinegar and garlic sauce stirred in at the table to taste. Baklava usually closes the meal. Rakia comes before the wine, not after – open with wine at a Bulgarian New Year’s table and expect some good-natured grief about doing it backwards. If you’d like to try any of this at home first, we’ve written up a few of the easiest Bulgarian recipes to start with.

Kukeri and the bells

Kukeri performers dance wearing chanove – heavy bells strapped around the waist – whose clanging is believed to drive off evil spirits and wake the land for the season ahead. The Kukeri are among Bulgaria’s most recognizable folk performers, and their masks still follow patterns handed down through specific villages rather than one standard design. Every mask ends up a little different, sometimes on purpose, sometimes because the carver ran out of the right animal horn that year.

These rituals blend Thracian practice with wider pagan traditions that predate Bulgaria’s Christian calendar by centuries. Pernik is the biggest and easiest place to see it firsthand. It’s recognized by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage and sits about 30 km southwest of Sofia – a 40-minute drive or a short train ride, making it a comfortable day trip rather than its own destination. Two smaller regional versions worth knowing: Razlog’s Starcheva Festival (around January 17th) and Yambol’s “Kukerlandia” (February) – both draw a fraction of Pernik’s crowds without the festival infrastructure.

If you want to see it yourself

Base yourself in Sofia rather than Pernik. Pernik has limited hotel capacity, and Sofia is only 30-40 minutes away by car or a direct train, so you keep more accommodation choices and can still make the morning parades. See our guide to Sofia for where to stay. Entry to Surva itself is free – the only real cost is transport. Winters in Pernik run colder than coastal Bulgaria, so dress for standing outside for hours, not for a city walk; our guide to what to wear in Romania or Bulgaria in winter is worth a look before you pack.

One more thing, if you’re considering both countries in the same trip: since January 1st, 2025, Romania and Bulgaria have both been full Schengen members, including at land borders, so there’s no passport check crossing between them anymore. Driving from Moldavia to Sofia for Pernik is roughly 600 km, a full day on the road – at least the border itself isn’t the bottleneck anymore.

Two ways of doing the same thing

Romania and Bulgaria are solving the same problem from opposite directions. Romania’s customs are scattered by village and largely unmanaged – Capra, Ursul, and Plugușorul survive because families and small troupes keep them going, not because a tourism board organized them, and the closest thing to a curated sampler is one afternoon in Sighetu Marmației. Bulgaria’s version has consolidated into fewer, bigger, better-signposted events – Pernik’s Surva alone draws thousands on a published schedule.

Ask which country to pick for a first New Year’s folklore trip with only a few days to spare, and I usually point people to Bulgaria – Pernik sits close to an international airport, runs on a predictable calendar, and needs neither a car nor a translator. With more time, some Romanian, or a taste for things a little rough around the edges, Romania rewards the extra effort with something less packaged.

Either way, the point was never really the fireworks. It’s watching a tradition older than the current borders of either country still doing exactly what it was built to do: making enough noise that the old year leaves and the new one shows up ready to behave.

If any of this sounds like the kind of New Year’s trip you’d actually want – not a hotel countdown package, but the version locals grew up with – get in touch with Balkan Trails and we’ll build the itinerary around whichever year’s festival dates are current when you’re traveling.