Spectacles on vo.rs

Sankt Hans Aften: The Night Denmark Lights Bonfires on the Beach

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Nordic LARP: The Weekend You Become Someone Else

Sat, 16 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Horsens Medieval Festival: When a Danish City Time-Travels 600 Years

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The Wife-Carrying World Championships: The Prize Is the Wife's Weight in Beer

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The finish straight at Sonkajärvi is 253.5 metres of sand and gravel with a chest-deep pit of brown water dug into the middle of it, and the man barrelling towards you has a fully grown adult hanging upside-down off his back like a rucksack that grew legs. She is gripping his waist with both hands. Her ankles are hooked over his shoulders. Her head is somewhere around his kidneys. He can’t see her, she can’t see where they’re going, and the pair of them are moving at a speed that would embarrass most club runners on dry, unencumbered ground. This is the Wife-Carrying World Championships, and the winner will be handed his teammate’s exact bodyweight in beer.

Slinningsbålet: Norway's Record-Breaking Bonfire Tower

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Every summer in the coastal town of Ålesund, on the west coast of Norway, a group of local teenagers spends about seven weeks hand-stacking wooden pallets into a tower dozens of metres tall, without cranes or machines, and then, on the Saturday nearest midsummer, they set it on fire and burn the whole thing down in front of the town. In 2016 the tower reached 47.4 metres — roughly a fifteen-storey building — and took the Guinness World Record for the world’s tallest bonfire. This is Slinningsbålet, and it is one of the most astonishing feats of pure communal stubbornness in the Nordic calendar.

Aalborg Karneval: Northern Europe's Biggest Carnival Is in Jutland

Sat, 24 May 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Walpurgis Night: How the North Burns Winter on the Last of April

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The last night of April is when the North collectively decides it has had enough of winter and lights a fire about it. From Copenhagen you can practically hear it happening across the Sound — Sweden going up in bonfires, choirs bellowing the spring in, a whole student class deciding that thirty hours without sleep is a reasonable price for the end of the dark. This is Valborg, Walpurgis Night, and it is the loud cousin of the quiet Danish midsummer I grew up with. I want to tell you where it comes from, because the answer involves an English saint who never set foot up here and almost certainly never wanted a bonfire named after her.

Jokkmokk Winter Market: The Sámi Gathering Above the Arctic Circle

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Every year on the first Thursday of February, a town of a few thousand people north of the Arctic Circle swells to tens of thousands, in temperatures that regularly sit at minus thirty, because the Jokkmokk winter market has been the great gathering of the Sámi world since 1605 and four centuries of cold has never once been reason enough to cancel. This is Swedish Lapland — Sápmi, in the Sámi tongue, the land that stretches across the top of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola Peninsula of Russia — and Jokkmokk’s market is its oldest continuous appointment.

The Krampus Runs: The Alpine Night the Devils Take the Street

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

On the evening of 5 December, in Alpine towns from Salzburg down through the Tyrol and across into Bavaria and South Tyrol, the streets fill with horned devils. They stand two and a half metres tall in matted fur, faces carved from limewood into something between a goat and a nightmare, cowbells the size of buckets slung around their waists, and they come at the crowd swinging birch switches and roaring. This is the Krampuslauf — the Krampus run — and it is the loudest, strangest, most physical Christmas tradition in Europe. I have not stood in an Alpine square while a Krampus singled me out, so this is a correspondent’s read from history and reportage rather than a night I have survived. What it is, where it comes from, and why a region would build this into its December, is worth the walk through.

Whitby Goth Weekend: The Subculture Pilgrimage

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Twice a year a small fishing town on the North Yorkshire coast, population around thirteen thousand, fills up with thousands of people dressed in black velvet, corsetry, top hats, Victorian mourning wear and the occasional set of leathery wings, and the town has gone from tolerating it to depending on it. Whitby Goth Weekend runs every April and every late October, timed to Halloween, and it is Britain’s great subculture pilgrimage — the place a music scene decided to call home.

Kubb: The Viking Lawn Game With a World Championship on Gotland

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 09:00:00 +0000

On the Swedish island of Gotland every August, hundreds of teams gather on mown grass to throw wooden sticks at other wooden sticks, and the last team standing is crowned world champion of kubb. It is the calmest, sunniest, most beer-friendly world championship I know, and I have made the trip across the Baltic to see it with my own eyes.

Kubb — pronounced roughly “koob” — is a Nordic lawn game, and the World Championship, the Kubb VM, has been held since 1995 in the village of Rone on Gotland’s southern half. That first year drew 28 teams, most of them local Gotlanders. It has grown into a genuinely international gathering since, hundreds of teams filling a field for a long August weekend, but it has kept the character of the first edition: relaxed, sunburnt, faintly ridiculous, and utterly charming.

The Borderland: Denmark's Participatory Burn, Where There Are No Spectators

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The Roskilde Naked Run: The Festival's Oldest, Barest Tradition

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0000

There is a moment on the Saturday of Roskilde Festival, somewhere in the sprawling chaos of the campsite, when a crowd thickens along a stretch of dirt track, a countdown goes up, and a few dozen entirely naked people take off running for a lap while thousands cheer them home. This is the Roskilde Naked Run, and it is the daftest, most good-humoured, most reliably Danish thing on the whole festival calendar. I have stood in that crowd more than once — Roskilde is home turf for me, the festival I keep coming back to — and I can tell you the run is exactly as silly and exactly as warm-hearted as its reputation promises. Here is where it came from and why it still, gloriously, happens.

The Hobbyhorse Championships: Finland's Most Earnest Sport

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 09:00:00 +0000

At a Finnish sports hall you will find a full showjumping arena — poles, rails, a proper course, a judging table, an anxious hush before each round — and the horses are made of fabric and a stick. This is the Finnish Hobbyhorse Championships, and if your first instinct is to laugh, hold that thought, because the athleticism on display will stop you doing it twice.

I cover loud rooms and physical crowds for a living, and I came to hobbyhorsing the way most outsiders do — through a viral clip, ready to smirk. What I found instead was one of the most quietly impressive subcultures in the Nordic region, a homegrown Finnish phenomenon run largely by and for teenage girls, built on real craft, real fitness, and a startling amount of nerve. It deserves to be written about with the same respect I would give any scene that means something to the people inside it.

The Battle of the Oranges: Ivrea and the Carnival That Throws 500 Tonnes of Fruit

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Every February a small town in Piedmont, at the mouth of the Aosta valley, spends three days pelting itself with citrus until the cobbles run with pulp and the whole place smells like a marmalade factory that has caught fire. This is Ivrea, an hour north of Turin, and the event is the Battaglia delle Arance — the Battle of the Oranges, the centrepiece of the Storico Carnevale di Ivrea. It is one of the oldest and by some distance the most violent-looking carnivals in Europe, and I have never been. I want to say that plainly, because the honest version of this piece is a correspondent’s read from the record, not a war story I have earned. What follows is the town’s own history, the mechanics of the fight, and why a place would agree, year after year, to bruise itself for a legend.

Up Helly Aa: A Thousand Torches and a Burning Galley

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The last Tuesday of January, when the North Atlantic has spent weeks trying to peel the roofs off Lerwick, up to a thousand men march through the town carrying flaming torches over their heads. At the front walks a man dressed as a Norse chieftain, in a raven-winged helmet and a mail shirt he has spent a year and a fortune assembling. Behind him, a full-size wooden longship rolls on wheels. The procession spirals in on a marked burning site, the torch-bearers form a ring, and on a bugle signal they hurl a thousand burning brands into the galley at once. The thing goes up like a struck match. Sixty seconds later it is a bonfire the size of a house, and Shetland stands in the orange dark, singing, while the wind carries the sparks out over the harbour.

Stonehaven Fireballs: Scotland Swings Fire on Hogmanay

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 09:00:00 +0000

At the last stroke of midnight on Hogmanay, roughly forty people walk up the High Street of Stonehaven with balls of fire spinning at the end of five feet of chain, and the whole town comes out to watch them do it. This is Aberdeenshire, the harbour town about fifteen miles south of Aberdeen, and this is how the north-east of Scotland decides to greet a new year — by carrying open flame through a crowd of thousands, in the dark, in the cold, with the North Sea slapping the harbour wall a hundred yards away.

The Air Guitar World Championships: Absurdity With a Peace-and-Love Manifesto

Fri, 25 Aug 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Every August, in a mid-sized city 500-odd kilometres north of Helsinki, a crowd gathers in the market square to watch grown adults play guitars that do not exist. There is a stage, a proper PA, a panel of judges with scorecards, a compère, and stakes that the organisers will tell you, entirely straight-faced, involve the future of the human species. The instrument is imaginary. The championship is not. Welcome to Oulu, and to the single most Finnish sporting event ever devised.

Heavy Metal Knitting World Championship

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Picture a proper metal stage — a wall of amps, a headbanging crowd, the whole eastern-Finnish summer roaring at full volume — and then look at what the performers are holding. Not guitars. Needles and yarn. The Heavy Metal Knitting World Championship is exactly what it sounds like, and it is one of the finest things Finland has ever done to a music festival, which for a country that gave us Air Guitar is saying something.

The World Bodypainting Festival: Skin as the Last Untaxed Canvas

Sat, 15 Jul 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Every July a lake town in the south of Austria fills up with people who have spent eight hours painting on other people, and by evening the results walk out onto a stage under lights: humans turned into reptiles, into galaxies, into cubist portraits, into things with no name at all. This is the World Bodypainting Festival, the largest gathering of its kind on earth and the closest the discipline has to an Olympics. I have never been — Carinthia in July is a long way off my usual loud-and-Nordic beat — so this is a correspondent’s read from the record: where the thing came from, how the competition actually runs, and why the human body turns out to be the most demanding canvas an artist can choose.

Cheese Rolling at Cooper's Hill: Chasing a Wheel Down a Cliff

Mon, 29 May 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Once a year on a hillside in Gloucestershire, a man rolls a wheel of cheese off the top of a near-vertical slope, and a crowd of people throw themselves down after it. The cheese wins. It almost always wins. The cheese rolling at Cooper’s Hill is the most reckless folk event in Britain, and I say that with enormous affection.

Cooper’s Hill sits near the village of Brockworth, outside Gloucester. It is a grassy slope of roughly 26 degrees at the shallow end and something close to a 1-in-2 gradient at the worst of it — steep enough that from the bottom, looking up, the runners at the top appear to be standing on a wall. Every Spring Bank Holiday, at the tail end of May, people gather here to chase a 7-to-9-pound wheel of Double Gloucester down that wall, and the winner keeps the cheese.

Las Fallas: Valencia Builds Giants for a Year, Then Burns Them in a Night

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Somewhere in Valencia right now, a workshop the size of an aircraft hangar holds a thirty-foot cartoon politician with the head of a pig, and the people who built him already know the exact hour they are going to set him on fire. That is the deal. That is the whole engine of Las Fallas, and once you understand it the festival stops looking like a party and starts looking like something closer to a religion with better pyrotechnics.

The Gävle Goat: Sweden's Giant Straw Goat and Its Yearly Arson Saga

Sun, 11 Dec 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Every December a Swedish city builds a thirteen-metre goat out of straw, plants it in the main square, and then more or less holds its breath to see whether the thing survives to New Year. Most years it does not. The Gävle Goat is the strangest running gag in Scandinavia, a monument that exists partly to be admired and mostly, it seems, to be set on fire, and it has been playing out this way since 1966.

Ottery St Mary's Tar Barrels: Devon Runs Flaming Casks Through the Crowd

Sat, 05 Nov 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Every fifth of November, in a small Devon town, a grown adult crouches, and a group of other adults lower a burning wooden barrel — coated on the inside with tar, fully alight, throwing sparks and smoke — onto their back and shoulders, and then that person stands up and runs into a crowd so tight there is nowhere for the crowd to go. This is Ottery St Mary’s Tar Barrels, and it is, by a distance, the most alarming fire tradition in Britain. I have never seen it. Having read everything about it I could find, I am not entirely sure I would keep my nerve if I did, and I have spent years in the front third of metal crowds specifically because I like it there.

Bog Snorkelling: Wales's Great Peat-Trench World Championship

Sun, 28 Aug 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Every August Bank Holiday, grown adults in wetsuits and flippers lower themselves face-first into a trench of cold peat water in mid-Wales and thrash 120 yards through the dark. This is the World Bog Snorkelling Championship, and it is exactly as absurd, as cold, and as gloriously pointless as it sounds.

The venue is Waen Rhydd, a boggy patch near Llanwrtyd Wells in Powys — a place that bills itself as the smallest town in Britain and behaves like the eccentric uncle of the whole country. The organisers cut a trench roughly 60 yards long straight through the peat, fill it with the sort of brown, tannin-stained water that gives Welsh bogs their smell, and invite anybody daft enough to swim two lengths of it against the clock. First championship: 1985. It has run in August almost every year since, pausing only when the whole world paused in 2020 and 2021.

Mobile Phone Throwing: Finland's Sport of Hurling Your Nokia

Sat, 13 Aug 2022 09:00:00 +0000

In the year 2000, in the Finnish lake town of Savonlinna, somebody decided the most satisfying thing you could do with an obsolete mobile phone was to throw it as far as humanly possible. They were, of course, completely correct. Thus was born the Mobile Phone Throwing World Championship, and Finland added another entry to its remarkable catalogue of taking a joke entirely seriously.

The origin story is almost too good. The event was launched by a Savonlinna translation and interpretation company, whose multinational staff apparently had a lot of frustration and a lot of dead handsets to work through. The two problems solved each other. You take yesterday’s technology, you wind up, you hurl it across a field, and the local recycling centre collects the wreckage afterwards. Catharsis and waste management in one clean motion. It has run in Savonlinna most years since, usually in late summer.

Swamp Football World Championships

Sat, 30 Jul 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Take a game of football, remove the pitch, and replace it with a peat bog that swallows your leg to the knee on every stride. That is swamp football — suopotkupallo — and every summer a few hundred teams travel to a remote corner of northern Finland to play it on purpose, at speed, until they can barely stand. It is exhausting to watch. It looks like the most fun you can have with your boots full of mud.

Viking Markets: Denmark's Living Iron Age, Every Summer

Sun, 24 Jul 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Beltane Fire Festival: Edinburgh Wakes the Summer on Calton Hill

Sat, 30 Apr 2022 09:00:00 +0000

On the last night of April, a hill in the middle of Edinburgh fills with drums and torchlight and several hundred people painted red from the scalp down, and they spend the dark hours dragging summer up out of the ground by force. That is Beltane, and the strangest thing about it is how new it is. The rite it performs is old enough to be genuinely Celtic. The festival you can actually attend was built by a handful of art-punks in 1988, and I think that combination is exactly why it works.