Hoarse - ceremonial item

It was an old custom deriving from Slavic tradition, and practised also by the immigrants of German origin, for groups of costumed carol signers to visit the villagers during the Christmas and carnival season. Animal characters played an important role in these processions. People enacting these characters were equipped with handmade props representing the animals. One of them was a horse, resembling the Lajkonik from Krakow, although with more humble decorations. A boy mounting the hobbyhorse would put a cloth that covered his legs and part of the prop. Similar characters appeared in southern Poland - a hobbyhorse consisting of a wooden horse head, attached to a large basket with no bottom, which the masqueraders playing the horse would get into. In the folk cultures of entire Europe, the horse was considered an exceptional animal and was ascribed with such qualities as beauty, pride, fertility, vitality, strength and health (the latter can even be found in Polish idioms: strong and healthy as a horse). The role of the horse merrily dancing and romping around the room was to pass on these traits to the inhabitants. The hobbyhorse from the collection of the Department of Ethnography of Pomerania of the National Museum in Szczecin was made at the beginning of the 20th century. It comes from the town of Wierzchocino, Słupsk poviat. It consists of a realistically depicted, white-painted horse head, a board and a hoop attached to its back, which was most probably used to fix the prop on the body of the masquerader. Originally the hobbyhorse it was in the collection of the Pommersches Landesmuseum Stettin.

Agnieszka Słowińska