Every year on Jan. 14, Ukraine celebrates “the old New Year” – the New Year by the Julian Calendar, by which the country lived until 1918. This old holiday also coincides in Ukraine with Malanka, a traditional carnival-like holiday from pre-Christian times.

“It’s a kind of a Ukrainian masquerade,” says ethnologist Inna Kuklina, an employee of Kyiv’s open-air Pyrohovo Museum of Folk Architecture and Life of Ukraine. “There was no hard work in winter, so young men could take part in this rite. The New Year wasn’t as important in a religious sense as, for example, Christmas, so the old pre-Christian rituals were preserved in the Malanka celebrations.”