Friday, May 04, 2007

Maibrossa

On the first of May, it is traditional in Sweden to gather the community together and engage in a bit of pagan frivolity. Ever since prehistoric times, communities have used this day to light up a bonfire that is supposed to scare off the winter spirits and mark the passage of ski season into orienteering season.

Jan invited me to Stöcke, where he lives to celebrate with his family.

Stöcke is a town of maybe a few hundred people just on the outskirts of Umeå. It could actually be considered a suburb, except for historical reasons. Anyhow, it is not a big place.

My idea of a bonfire is something like a giant campfire. Maybe an order of magnitude bigger, tops. So say, a stack of wood a few feet high and a few feet wide.

So imagine my surprise when I arrived to see this:

This is a fairly substantial pile of wood. As in, it is the size of a small house. You could easily torch a witch on a pile like that.


And here it is actually on fire. It took a while for the whole thing to go up because the wind was against the flame. On the top right of the pile, you can just make out the witch. The heat this thing gave off was unbelievable. It was like staring into the face of the sun. You could not get within 50 meters of it when it was in full flame. It also gave off a huge amount of smoke.

And remember, every town over a few hundred people had one of these.

It would be very interesting to take a look at the environmental impact of these things. There was a pall of wood smoke hanging over all of Umeå that night. Interesting that in such an enviro conscious place, tradition still trumps the environment.

posted by Jeff @ 12:55 PM

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