Kourbania

Kourbania (Greek: το κουρμπάνι (sing.), τα κουρμπάνια (pl.); via Turkish Kurban; from the Arabic qurban "sacrificial victim"; compare Hebrew korban) refers to a practice of Christianized animal sacrifices in some parts of Greece. It usually involves the slaughter of lambs as "kourbania" offerings to certain saints.

In antiquity the sacrifice was offered for health (or following an accident or illness), as a votive offering promised to the Lord by the community, or by the relatives of the victim. Writing in 1979, Stella Georgoudi stated that the custom survived in "some villages of modern Greece" and was "slowly deteriorating and dying out".

A similar custom from Bulgaria known as Kurban is celebrated on St. George's day.

The practice involves the blood sacrifice (θυσία, thusia) of a domestic animal to either a saint, taken as the tutelary of the village in question, or dedicated to the Holy Trinity or the Virgin. The animal is slaughtered outside the village church, during or after the Divine Liturgy, or on the eve of the feast day. The animal is sometimes led into the church before the icon of the saint, or even locked in the church during the night preceding the sacrifice. Most of the kourbania are spread between April and October.

The descriptions (for both the Byzantine and Turkish periods) of this θυσία, or kurban (in Turkish), are numerous indeed, and are an example of one popular element which the Turks adopted from Byzantium. The most detailed description is given by the sixteenth-century Turkish slave Bartholomaeus Gourgieuiz:

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