While us Brits are grudgingly pencilling in a spring clean, the Swedes are embracing the new season with an altogether more spiritual, fun, and surprisingly Anglo adjö to dark nights.
The Nordic people never miss an opportunity to party, and what better excuse than the advent of longer daylight? The night of April 30 sees Swedes take to the streets to celebrate Walpurgis Eve.
The originally German festival takes its name from an English (possibly royal) nun born in 710, whose elevation to sainthood fell on the same date which Swedish pagans celebrated fertility and the return of spring. When Sweden converted to Christianity, the two events merged and a festival was born which on modern Scandinavia’s calendar of events sits third in importance only to Christmas and Midsummer.
For some, great bonfires metaphorically send winter up in smoke, while others achieve a more literal farewell to icy gloom with the burning of the previous seasons’ Christmas trees and other garden and household debris.
In university towns Uppsala, Lund and Gothenburg, students in white graduation caps chant odes to spring below a night’s sky ablaze with fireworks, while Skansen Open Air Museum ushers in Stockholm’s largest Walpurgis (or Valborg, to use its Swedish name) celebration with an emphasis on the darker remnants of the festival’s history.
As well as fending off predators from fields due to be occupied by grazing livestock, the Vikings traditionally made bonfires to deter evil spirits, demons and witches. It would have been around about this time of year that the ancient dead and living witches were rumoured to meet among nature in a final winter fling before spring.
As well as hosting the most ferocious bonfires in the country, Skansen further recalls these times with the tolling of church bells (noise was also thought to ward off evil spirits), Halloween style pranks and games, and children dressing up as witches.
With flights to Stockholm taking under three hours (alternatively, a boat from Newcastle to Gothenburg takes 24 hours), Walpurgis Eve sure beats a feather duster and a pair of marigolds.
For more information on spring breaks to Sweden visit www.visit-sweden.com.
Images clockwise from top: Maypole by Patrick Tragardh, Fireworks by Richard Ryan for Stockholm Visitors Board, Running in Water by Goran Assner for Swedish Travel and Tourism Council. Please note that Channel 4 is not responsible for the content of third party sites.
Walpurgis Eve isn’t the only festival putting winter to bed. Here’s a pick of other spring holidays going on around the world.
