Christmas Carp

carp

The centrepiece of the traditional Christmas Eve feast in Poland is Carp. If you walk around the streets of almost any village, town or city in Poland you will come across streetcorner sellers with live carp for sale. Customers pick out their favourite fish, and the vendor bags the fish live and the fish taken home. These Christmas carp are kept alive in large buckets or the bathtub until Christmas Eve, when it killed and cooked! In some parts of Poland and the Czech Republic it is a custom to carry a large scale from the head of a carp eaten on Christmas Eve as a token of luck. This particular photograph of street carp sellers was taken in Skwierzyna, Lubuskie, Poland.