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.

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.

Austria on vo.rs

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

The World Bodypainting Festival: Skin as the Last Untaxed Canvas