Wedding Traditions and Customs

Padlocks of the Heart

Remember ‘Calamity Jane’, when Doris Day , racing from behind a rock, to stand in front of a tree, flying off to lean against another tree, all the while singing away about her secret love for Wild Bill Hickok?

No doubt, there would be a time when Bill and Jane would reenter the little woodland, or whatever it was, and Bill, unsheathing his Bowie knife, would slash out a heart in the bark of ‘Black Hills’ White Spruce, or Ponderosa Pine, and whittle out Bill loves Jane XXX.

Many years later Jane and Bill would come back to see if they could still find the heart, and laugh at their youthful follies.

Many of such innocent pastimes are well and truly over. Nor is anyone encouraging girls and boys to be running around with knives and slashing away at trees – no matter for what romantic reasons.

But couples, all over the world, are still running around trying to express their sentiment in a public way.

For example, there is an old Russian wedding tradition where a couple, after exchanging their wedding vows, take a padlock to some public place, like a bridge, and after attaching it, throw away the key into the water. This symbolizing the unbreakable bond of marriage. Often the padlocks will have inscribed on it the spouses' names together with the wedding date.

In many large cities of Asia, it's lovers, and not married couples, who are attaching padlocks to popular places to proclaim publicly their commitment to each other. Some of these places are specifically designed and built for just this purpose. Couples in love will bring with them one padlock with two keys. After attaching the padlock, they will each take a key. Should they break up sometime in the future, one or both of them will come back and ceremoniously take off the padlock. This is deemed as a visual symbol of farewell and let’s get on with the rest of our lives.

While in some cities the tradition is put up with by the authorities, there are some who are getting extremely unsympathetic to the lover. On the Ponte Vechio, around the bust of Cellini, lovers put locks with their initials on the railings that go around the statue. The practice is beginning to annoy the authorities since the weight of the locks is undermining the structure itself. Despite the fact that the padlocks are getting removed ever so often, and lovers are threatened with all sorts of penalties, because the place is so associated with lovers, as fast as the city fathers get rid of one lot of padlocks, hundreds of lovers are cueing up to put up some more.

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