Tag #126179 - Interview #78424 (Raina Blumenfeld)

When I was a child I knew a lot of games, which are not played nowadays. Boys and girls used to play The King-Gateman. This game wasn’t only known by the Jewish population in Sofia. Two boys hold each other’s hands above their heads to make a gate. All the others line up in a queue and pass between them, singing: ‘King-and-Gateman! Open the gates and let the King’s army pass through! Open, close, leave only one man!’ When the last word is sung, the two boys, through whose ‘gate’ the others pass, suddenly drop their hands and catch somebody. The last one to remain takes the place of one of ‘gate-boys’ and so everything is repeated on and on. We also used to play a men’s game, ‘jelick’, we would dig a hole, put a piece of wood on top of it and with another piece of wood had to throw it out as far as possible.