Late January to early March is a busy time of year for nightmarish traditions. In northern Europe, our ancestors had been cooped up for months and gone a bit odd; they would take any excuse to talk obscene trash about their neighbours and social superiors, scare winter or evil spirits away with a funny hat, kill pretend bears, throw food or set something on fire.
The weird rituals are a grab bag of Catholic, pagan and pure social convenience. Catholic carnival was about enjoying a last hurrah before Lent. There was also a feudal understanding that a brief spell of codified anarchy and semi-official debauchery operates as a useful social pressure valve. Then there’s the OG – paganism. Europe went understandably wild for rites marking the passage from winter into spring, trying to get the spirits on side for a year of good weather and bountiful harvest, throwing around symbols of purification and fertility.
Speaking of throwing, there’s a lot of that too. In Dunkirk they chuck herring; at Krakelingen the “authorities” drink from a cup full of live fish, then throw pretzels at the crowd; in Binche, it’s blood oranges, in Aalst it’s onions (well, now it’s onion-shaped sweets).
Other weirdnesses include pretend bear hunts: I was initially baffled at the profusion of bears in Italy, Spain, Germany, Belgium and beyond, but I suppose if there was any risk of a bear in the neighbourhood waking hungry from hibernation, you’d want to kill (or pretend to kill) it first. Then, dressing up and fire are always fun: brightness and warmth are a logical retort to winter, and disguises or masks offered anonymity, an escape from social convention and crucially, the opportunity to look ridiculous, or even better, terrifying.
Time to brush off the herring juice, confetti and pretzel crumbs and show you some pictures. (Exit, pursuing a bear.)
The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, 1559
Traditionally carnival was your last chance for fun before Lent ruined everything, as Bruegel the Elder shows in intensely chaotic detail here. The man with a blackbird pie for a hat, woman carrying a monkey in a basket, a man wielding a giant nail-studded club wearing a green romper suit … It lends itself to the “tag yourself” game: I wish I was the man bottom left playing dice in a hat made of waffles, but I’m actually the deceased-looking grey woman with a beehive on her head.
The carnival of Basel, 1899
Nothing says “anarchic fun, subversion and the reversal of the established order” like rules, and Basel’s confetti-throwing, masked carnival, dating from the 14th century, has lots. It lasts precisely 72 hours ending at 4am on a Thursday; it’s “considered inappropriate” to remove your mask; throwing straw is banned and “throwing mixed confetti is seen as very bad form”. I hope these witches – pictured in the 1960s – are moving clockwise around the inner ring of the parade, otherwise someone will definitely complain to the authorities.
Aussee carnival, 1904
According to Unesco (an organisation I hold responsible for the continued vigour of many unpleasant carnival traditions, sorry, “intangible heritage of humanity”), these blingy figures from Aussee’s seasonal festivities are called “Flinserln” or “Glitterers”. Their duties include handing out nuts to small children who can recite a poem and they are accompanied by some other guys in white – Pless – representing winter, who wear beehives on their heads. The carnival was originally an opportunity for workers in the local salt industry to get some stuff off their chests about the higher-ups; “Faschingsbriefe” (gossipy letters read out in public places) still dish the dirt on local scandal.
New Orleans Mardi Gras, 1907
Europe was kind enough to export some of its weirdest folklore to countries it was busy oppressing, which is how New Orleans acquired its own carnival traditions, with explorer Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville’s men inaugurating a celebration as far back as 1699. Mardi Gras was often highly satirical – in 1873 a famous edition had papier-mache costumes and floats satirising The Origin of Species, depicting Darwin himself as a donkey. Here I’m mainly struck by bowler hats, as far as the eye can see.
Munich carnival, 1928
“Whether clown’s nose, dinner jacket or elaborately crocheted full-body bee costume – every form of disguise has its place in Munich’s Fasching,” I read on the Munich tourist website about the local carnival. Hmm. Do 10 clowns arm in arm also have their place? I know this isn’t objectively horrifying, but they look so forcefully cheerful it’s a red flag for me. The modern version seems to involve a similarly exhausting amount of dance-based good humour. Can I just go and pretend to be a sleeping bear until someone pretends-kills me?
Nice, 1928
Not a nice giant lobster, obviously, but one from the Côte d’Azur resort. This is a proper historic carnival: the first mention dates from 1294 and it’s been going in its current incarnation since 1873. Giant figures feature in many carnival traditions in France and Belgium – they were originally a 13th-century Portuguese tradition and spread north. Often a giant would represent the protector of the local community; this one, I would hazard, represents dinner. Yum.
Gilles de Binche, 1930
No one seems to know why the small Belgian town of Binche celebrates carnival so strenuously (I suspect an outbreak of early modern ergotism). The “Gilles” (local men only) wake in the middle of the night to have their weird suits crammed with straw (a process called “le bourrage” – the stuffing) and put on wooden clogs and wax masks decorated with creepy green spectacles. Some also wear 3-4kg ostrich feather hats but only for one special afternoon of the three-day event. Far worse than the orange-throwing is the fact they start drumming and playing their tin whistles at 5am. Absolutely not.
Kurentovanje, 1961
At this splendid Slovenian carnival, “groups of kurents or kurenti wear traditional sheepskin garments while holding wooden clubs with hedgehog skins attached called ježevke, the noise of which is believed to ‘chase away winter’”. This sounds venerably ancient but the official event only dates from the 1950s. (Perhaps people had hedgehog skin clubs before that? Unclear.) I love this photo, because it looks like two thrilled fans having their picture taken with Harry Styles, except Harry Styles is a malevolent Womble.
Surva folk festival, Bulgaria, 1969
Across Bulgaria, kukeri (disguised figures with masks and animal skin garments) traditionally emerged to dance like something out of an R-rated Maurice Sendak at various points between Christmas and Lent. The biggest gathering of them – in all their horrifying diversity – happens at the Surva festival in Pernik, where these ones were photographed. It looks and sounds incredible, but I imagine you would never sleep again if you attended. Kukeri were apparently designed to “inspire fear and terror in the ‘evil forces’ threatening the farmer and his labour throughout the year”. Presumably inspiring fear and terror in absolutely everyone else was considered acceptable collateral damage.
• This article was amended on 9 February 2024. An earlier version suggested that the image accompanying the carnival of Basel was from 1899 when in fact it was taken in the mid 1960s.
