The Holiday of Jordan (Blessing of water).

The Feast of the Jordan (Epiphany, January 6) — celebrated with the blessing of water in Orthodox and Greek Catholic traditions — was one of the great communal religious events of the Hutsul people of the Carpathian highlands, a community that fascinated Axentowicz throughout his career. His 1895 painting of this ceremony belongs to the moment when Young Poland artists were intensely engaged with folk culture as a source of authentic national identity, seeking in peasant traditions a vitality unspoiled by modernizing urban life. Axentowicz's own Armenian-Polish heritage gave him a particular sensitivity to the hybrid, border-crossing cultures of Eastern Galicia. The ceremony — typically conducted outdoors at a river or blessed well, with elaborately costumed participants — offered visual richness: folk embroidery, religious icons, priests in vestments, and the winter landscape. Works of this subject formed part of a broader ethnographic artistic tradition that documented living cultural practices under the Habsburg Empire.

A crowd scene of this kind required organizing many figures, costumes, and spatial levels into a coherent composition. Axentowicz uses the ceremony's natural structure — participants gathered around a central ritual action — to arrange figures in depth, with costume color and embroidery pattern providing visual rhythm across the surface.