According to the folk calendar - Constantine circles

On March 19 (March 6, old style), according to the folk calendar, the circles of Constantine are celebrated The holiday takes its name in honor of St Constantine and 41 other martyrs, whose memory is honored by the Orthodox Church on this day Constantine was one of the 42 warriors who defended Ammorea during the siege by the Saracens in the mid-9th century But they were betrayed by the military leader, and the Christian soldiers were taken prisoner For 7 years they tried to persuade them to become Muslims First by persuasion, then by torture The martyrs endured courageously, without betraying their faith in the Lord, but as a result their heads were cut off There was a tradition among the people in Constantine circles to take care of wells They performed the ritual of compacting snow around their well First, they asked a boy named Kostya to complete the first lap, and then the whole family joined in This was done to preserve clean well water from dirty melted snow Residents paid respect to well water by visiting baths Residents have always treated wells with respect It was forbidden to spit or throw stones at them It was forbidden for women in pregnancy or after childbirth to fetch water Rituals were performed near the well to call for rain in a dry year Villagers believed that dead relatives looked at the living from the well water, so they behaved decently near the well During the day, during the Constantine Circle, it was illuminated, and in the evening, the household deliberately did not finish dinner in order to share the leftovers with their ancestors, and threw them into the well The return of storks was visible in the circles of Constantine They were associated with new life and believed that they brought children into the family The stork was popularly considered an intelligent bird and even understood human speech He was called the guardian of family well-being, because if a stork built a nest on the roof, happiness awaited the family Offending a stork or destroying a nest led to misfortune in the family It was forbidden to quarrel on this day and speak swear words, it was forbidden to drink and slander others Healers performed a ritual to protect children from damage To do this, they warmed up the snow, read a spell over it, and buried it between aspen trees in a clay vessel If frost struck on the day of the Constantine Circle, the peasants prepared for a dry summer The appearance of snowdrops heralded the beginning of the sowing period The sound of a woodpecker foreshadowed the prolongation of cold days Sinking ice on a pond promised a bad harvest