Party Like the Ancients

Europe is home to an array of colorful, vibrant, and noisy festivals, where people come together to eat, drink, dance, and have fun. Tourists flock from across Europe and the world to take part. The majority of these folk festivals have their roots in the Christian calendar, which is surprising given that today they are usually more about parties than piety.

Whether it’s a saint’s day, the middle of summer, a crazy horse race, or just to enjoy a beer and good company, here we visit eight of the continent’s oldest – and strangest – folk festivals...

A very different type of mask is worn for Carnival celebrations in the Lötschental villages in Switzerland, where men roam the streets ringing bells and wearing furs and monstrous masks like the one here from 1925. The mask wearers are called Tschäggättä, or witches, and their job is to go about scaring people.

In Granada, Spain, this festival takes mask wearing in an altogether bigger direction during La Tarasca, which celebrates the mythical defeat of a dragon by St Martha. The parade, which has taken place since at least the early 19th century, is led by La Tarasca, a woman wearing a specially commissioned dress. She is followed by ‘giants’ with huge papier-mache heads, like this one inspired by Cervantes' Don Quixote from 2005.

Another saint’s day – better known as St Patrick’s day – is unusual because it has broken free of its original location in Ireland and is now celebrated by people all over the world thanks to the Irish diaspora, with some of the biggest celebrations taking place in the United States.

This is actually two festivals, held on 2 July and 16 August every year in Siena, Italy with two fiercely competitive sets of horse races, between riders representing their contrades or city wards. This picture shows how the riders compete bareback in brightly colored uniforms. It’s not uncommon for most of the horses to finish riderless at the end of three chaotic laps of the piazza.

In Catalonia, castells require a completely different kind of bravery. Castells are human towers built all across the region on festival days. The earliest known was made in Valls, Spain, in 1712, but the phenomenon quickly spread. It became hugely popular from the 1970s onwards.

Munich is home to a gathering of one of the largest folk festivals in the world. In a typical year at the Oktoberfest, nearly eight million litres of beer will be drunk. Strangely, the Oktoberfest also began as a horse racing event, but over the years has morphed into a 16-18 day beer festival, without a horse in sight.

We know very little about Stonehenge in England, beyond the fact that it was created 5,500 years ago to serve as a calendar, with the avenue through the stones aligning perfectly with the rising sun, once a year, at the summer solstice. The Bronze Age rituals that were carried out there are lost forever, but every year people gather there to celebrate the solstice with their own pagan rituals.

Whether ancient or modern, Europeans may have always had wildly different ways of celebrating their culturally important events, but those are clearly infectious. These days, our most ancient folk festivals aren’t just for the locals or even fellow Europeans to enjoy, they are for people from around the whole world.