Fire-Festival on vo.rs

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.