Kiev - The sky's the limit in modern Ukraine, a country long proud of traditional marriage celebrations engulfing whole villages for days, and where now wedding excess to impress is fully updated - and not at all cheap. This season in Ukraine, all the rage is a strapless one-piece pale beige (the retail term is "champagne") dress, hand made with full skirts and thick beadwork. During a recent Saturday afternoon at Kiev's mid-range Laura Salon, four future brides searching for a perfect and unique wedding gown demanded that very dress, and none batted a mascaraed eye at a listed price equivalent to three months' gross income by a middle-class Ukrainian family.
A high-end imported Italian wedding dress, frequently last season's, can retail in Ukraine for the price of a European sedan.
Glitzy Kiev salons now offer, to order and in matching colours, pillows for the rings to be carried on, garters fitted to the bride's thigh, purses to complement her exquisite gown, table cloths and napkins for the feasting.
There are even monogrammed sheets and tailored silk sleeping togs (filmy for her, manly for him) for the wedding night.
Besides boring old gold-embossed invitations and seating cards, Ukraine's budding publishing industry sells full-dress wedding books: a hardback suitable for any coffee table, and jammed with glossy photographs, childhood stories, the newlyweds' family trees plotted out by a licensed genealogist. These are a steal at two thousand dollars a copy
The Odessa-based Sviadbakino cinema production company for a reported minimum 15,000 dollars will make a full-length wedding film complete with lights, camera, action, a plot, music, a director, and professional editing.
As in past centuries, a proper Ukrainian wedding party is considered a success only if it lasts for more than one day and all attending are glutted, repeatedly, with food and drink.
But these days there is also intense effort put into keeping guests entertained with everything from professional MCs, DJs, pop groups, belly dancers, snake acts, comedians, fireworks, and ballroom dance troupes to professional astrologers hired for the festivities, so as to combat boredom between courses and dancing.
The exchange of vows no longer is always at the city registration office in front of an unsmiling bureaucrat. These days, Ukrainians are declaring their undying love in new and unique surroundings: underneath the Black Sea near a World War II shipwreck, on top of a Carpathian Mountain peak, during the half time break of a football match, on a river steamer, or even on an uninhabited Dnipro River island - all possible for a fee to one of the thousands of wedding services now operating in the country.
Registration offices nonetheless are doing a roaring trade and during the summer the popular ones are booked months in advance. In keeping with the hallowed rules of Ukrainian officialdom, the best way to avoid a two-hour wait is for some one (usually the hapless father of the bride) to bribe office staff to marry bride and groom on time.
A definite post-Soviet innovation is a blessing for the couple, almost always in overwhelmingly Christian Ukraine by an orthodox priest. Here too the market offers choice. A blessing at a home reception, sometimes, may be had for as little as a place for the priest at the feast table.
A full-length service in a 12th century church considered one of the holiest sites of Orthodox Christianity, on the other hand, is only possible after a voluntary donation reportedly in the thousands of dollars.
A critical part of any classy Ukrainian marriage these days is an automobile convoying the entire wedding party to scenic spots in the city where the couple poses, a professional photographer records for posterity, and guests drink.
Ukraine's rental industry offers a dizzying variety of transport for the expedition, besides limousines and buses including four-horse coaches, rickshaws, hay wagons, helicopters, military Hummers, Mercedes 500-series sedans with tinted black windows, which are favoured by Ukrainian mobsters, or even a Cadillac convertible in pink or white.
Another option is six car train (one restaurant car, two relaxation cars, one chapel car, one disco car, one staff car, and a locomotive), aboard which a couple and their 100 closest friends may hold a marriage ceremony, bless it, and then dance the next few days and nights away on a run ending in Scandinavia, for a mere 10,000 dollars a day.
Natalia and Evhen Simenov, just married this April, cleverly made their wedding unique by conveying their guests in 52 Chevorlet Aveo four-doors, thereby (according to Vasha Sviadba magazine) setting a world record for the world's longest-ever wedding cortege using a single vehicle make.
"It was so impressive, it took our breath away!" the newly-minted Mrs Simenov explained. "We were movie stars for an hour."
