You won’t believe how unusual wedding traditions can be! Forget about our boring wedding bouquet throwing and carrying the bride over threshold. These funny and interesting wedding customs from Lebanon will blow your mind. For example, try to find a connection between marriage and pizza dough. Intrigued? Then continue reading.
Beware the feet!
The first weird Lebanese tradition is that the bride and groom are supposed to step on the guests’ feet for good luck. Just imagine that you're dancing and stuff, and then the bride and groom, instead of dancing dabke (Lebanese folk dance) on the floor, they start dancing dabke on your feet.
Dough on the wall
After the wedding is over, the bride is given some dough, just like pizza dough. She has to smash this dough on the wall, and if it sticks, it means the marriage will be successful and they will live happily ever after, and if it does not stick, well, it’s a bad sign. So, if you want to marry a Lebanese person, start taking some cooking lessons, preferably pizza.
Lebanese zaffe
This is a very popular Lebanese wedding tradition. And, actually, not only Lebanese but Middle Eastern. It is a special cheerful dancing. A group of people dance at weddings performing important wedding rituals, like bringing out the bride and the groom (two different rituals), etc. A Lebanese wedding is a merry and noisy event. Usually, there are about 200 or 300 guests and all of them are expecting a huge show.
Heavy lifting
This is an old tradition, they don't do that anymore. But in the past, there was a ritual called “jurn el kibbeh”. So, “jurn el” is a big stone bowl and “kibbeh” is a meat dish. At a wedding, raw meat was put into a bowl, smashed the hell out of this raw meat, and then eaten. But before the wedding, when the groom goes to the bride's parents to ask for her hand, he has to lift up the jurn el kibbeh in order to prove his manhood and strength.
Kidnapping the groom
As you know, there is a tradition of kidnapping the bride in some cultures – when a man wants to marry a woman, he might kidnap her and force (literally or make-believe) her to become his bride.
But in Lebanon, the situation is the opposite – they have a tradition of kidnapping the groom before the day of the wedding. This is a rare tradition, it happens only in some villages of Lebanon. The bride is told about the whereabouts of her groom only directly before the wedding.
And these were some of the most interesting and unusual Lebanese wedding traditions. Really weird, aren’t they?
