This year’s Dyngus Parade will start at St. Stanislaus Kostka Church on Humboldt Street and will proceed along Engert Avenue, Russell Street, Nassau Avenue, Monitor Street, Driggs Avenue, ending at the center of McGolrick Park.
This year there will also be many attractions for children, such as: water splashing, delicious food, singing and guaranteed great fun. As every year, we will start the parade with a ceremonial cutting of the red ribbon, and then we will follow the float, singing well-known traditional songs and “WHAT DA HECK IS DYNGUS DAY”, “EVERYBODY’S POLISH ON DYNGUS”, “WE LOVE DYNGUS DAY”, IT’S DYNGUS DAY” and a new song “DYNGUS DANCE” where the choruses will be in Polish and English. Everyone will parade through the streets heading to McGolrick Park, located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York, where participants will be treated to Polish culinary delights.
Dyngus Day, also known as Śmigus-Dyngus, is a traditional Polish holiday that takes place on the Monday after Easter and celebrates the end of the Lenten observances. It is most associated with splashing water using various squirt guns, e.g., in the shape of an egg representing “holy water,” and with “Easter pussy willows.”
Dyngus Day is celebrated all over the world, but the largest parade in the world takes place in Buffalo, New York.
The first Dyngus Parade in Greenpoint, which took place on April 18, 2022, was organized by the parish priest of Greenpoint, Grzegorz Markulak, and Martyna Sokół, a public relations representative. David Musial was the video and sound producer. Kasia Drucker, on the other hand, was responsible for leading the musical part of the event, and also designed the poster for the First Dyngus Parade.
How did this event come about? Professor David Musial, whose roots are from Buffalo, New York, and who currently lives in Jersey City, composed a song in 2017, questioning in a way the roots of the festival, titled “WHAT DA HECK IS DYNGUS DAY?” One of his students, then ten-year-old Rafał Wołosz, came that same day for his weekly private lessons with his dad to his music studio and excitedly announced that he had completed his homework “EDM Techno in GarageBand on his iPhone!” Surprised by this comment, Professor Musiał, who had not given him any homework of this type, but suddenly remembered that he was Polish, asked Rafał to go to the vocal booth and sing the lyrics of the song to his composition and translate the chorus into Polish. And so the final track was created.
The song was used during the Dyngus Day Parade in Buffalo, New York in 2018, and parade chair Bernadette Pawlak announced that it was “the best in the history of the Parade” and “played on all radio stations.” She said it was not only informative but also fun. Tom Lorentz, Vice President of the Buffalo Music Hall Of Fame, provided the sound system!
In 2019, we returned with Rafał and his friends Maciej and Emelia Part and their families and performed in the parade together with the Polish Heritage Dancers of Western New York. In 2020, due to the pandemic, the parade did not take place, but a fragment of our parade film was broadcast on ABC television!
This is how the idea for an interesting project was born in 2022. Professor David Musiał and Polish opera singer and teacher Kasia Drucker created an educational project for children, Dyngus Day Songs.
David Musiał and Kasia Drucker
In cooperation with the Maria Konopnicka Polish School in Greenpoint, several children volunteered to learn to record a new song that we composed especially for this special day, titled “WE LOVE DYNGUS DAY!”. It was originally meant to be presented in Buffalo, but… when we announced our program, we expressed our dream that it might initiate a new tradition in NYC, the Dyngus Parade in Greenpoint. The idea was quickly picked up by Father Grzegorz Markulak, and after a joint meeting, he stated, “Great idea. Let’s do it.”
Eugenia’s Dyngus Truck Front
Dyngus is our Polish tradition; let’s give our children here in immigration the opportunity to cultivate this holiday and have fun, while inviting all New Yorkers to join in. That is why the First Dyngus Parade in NYC was created, not anywhere else, but in the cradle of Polish immigrants in Greenpoint.
