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written by Rough Guides Editors
updated 24.06.2019
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written by Rough Guides Editors
updated 24.06.2019
A great fire festival should be on everybody’s bucket list. Here we rundown some of the greats...
© Zdenka Mlynarikova/Shutterstock
If we’re being honest with ourselves here, Shetland’s Up Helly-Aa festival has its roots in Victorian creativity rather than any truly pagan history, but it’s extremely good fun, which is largely the point. At the end of the Yule season a procession of up to a thousand “guizers” march through Lerwick in gangs, finally reaching the shore where their burning torches are flung into a replica Viking longboat, which is pushed off to sea with great ceremony. Once the boat’s burning, the guizers proceed around local halls, schools, hotels and pubs, performing entertainments – the more flamboyant the better. Indeed such is the exuberance of the festival that it’s earned the local nickname “Tranvestite Tuesday”.
© Neil Lockhart/Shutterstock
Possibly the best-known modern fire festival, Burning Man is often seen as more of a temporary city than a festival. Tens of thousands descend on the Black Rock Desert for the week running up to Labor Day, for this great experiment in community and self-expression. A gift economy operates onsite, nobody uses money, which seems to work remarkably well considering that 2011’s attendance was capped at 50,000 and sold out. If you’re planning a visit, look seriously into how well you’re going to be able to look after yourself in what is, after all, a desert – without even cell phone coverage. The end of the week brings the burning of a great human figure and a temple, before what is perhaps the most breathtaking communitas of all, absolutely every trace of the festival is painstakingly removed leaving nothing but desert behind.
Top image © somsak nitimongkolchai/Shutterstock
written by Rough Guides Editors
updated 24.06.2019
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