‘Smigus Dyngus’ Is a Splash Hit in Poland

Poland was all wet on Monday.

Nationwide, young people hurled buckets of water at each other in the annual post-Easter folk holiday of “Pouring Monday.”

In Warsaw, the teen-agers also doused a few police officers who wandered by the good-natured and vaguely political water games that pitted a contingent of “Smurfs” dressed in blue against green-clad “Water People” in Castle Square. The 1,000 participants’ slogans had tongue-in-cheek confrontational overtones: “Freedom and Water,” “Free the Buckets” and “Smurfs (Cops) Go Home.”

Easter Monday is a national holiday, and the day’s traditional activity in the countryside is for peasant boys to soak not-so-reluctant girls with water. In Polish, the holiday is called “Smigus Dyngus” (pronounced SHMEE-goos DING-goos), a nonsense phrase meaning the custom of pouring water on people on Easter Monday.

“Pouring water” also is slang for “lying” in Poland, and participants raised a sign--later pulled down by police--that said: “The government spokesman is the best example of pouring water.”

Police walked through the crowd, stopping some people to check IDs and at times ordering young people to empty their buckets of water. But whenever they appeared about to detain one of the participants, the police were surrounded by groups chanting, “Let him go!” In the end, it appeared no one was arrested.