Tens of thousands join carnival revelry

Carnival is a big deal in most of Slovenia and the revelry reached its apex in sunny weather on Shrove. Tens of thousands of people attended celebrations in the most famous carnival towns of Ptuj and Cerknica, with smaller but as enthusiastic crowds gathering in other parts of the country, CE Report quotes The Slovenia Times.

The Kurentovanje in Ptuj, the biggest carnival in Slovenia, reached its climax with an international parade that featured 81 groups numbering over 3,000 participants. Tens of thousands of people descended on this small eastern Slovenian town to watch the parade.

All eyes were on the 1,000-odd kurents, the sheepskin-clad figures with cowbells around their belt whose job it is to chase away winter and which have been included in the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage.

But there were also large groups of pokači, who swing their giant whips to produce loud piercing sounds, and traditional groups such as the Dornava gypsies and young boys known as piceki, who are clad all in white with long colourful strands of paper hanging from their paper hats.

The honorary sponsor of the event, President Nataša Pirc Musar, said carnival figures chase away not just winter but also evil. "Let me be a bit cheeky: they should leave winter stay for a while, but they should by all means chase away evil," she said.

While the parade is the largest event of the two-week Kurentovanje, festivities will continue on Monday, when schools and kindergarten groups meet, and end on Tuesday, when the carnival ends with the burial of the carnival effigy.

Another major carnival is in Cerknica, where it famously starts at "around 12:32pm". The carnival there began exactly 50 years ago, which is why this year's edition was called pustoletja, a word that combines the Slovenian names for carnival and half a century in the local dialect.

The procession featured 1,500 performers and some 20,000 spectators, a number that Aljaž Červek, one of the local organisers, says was proof of how successful and well established the event is.

Cerknica has several well known carnival figures, most notably Uršula the witch and the Water Man from Cerknica Lake, but a new one was added to the line-up this year, a giant bear that fits into the existing pantheon of figures inspired by Butalci, a legendary late 19th century satirical book.

The Butalci bear is a four-metre effigy sitting on a tree stump that reaches to a height of give metres when it is stood up. According to Červek, it is a fitting addition to the Butalci bees, a float that was first introduced last year.