On the night of 30 April, bonfires burn on hills across Central Europe and straw witches go up in flames. Walpurgis Night is one of the oldest witch festivals still alive, and it is only one of several spring customs that drive out winter, evil and witches.
The night of the witches
Walpurgis Night is the eve of 1 May, named after Saint Walpurga. She was born in Devon in England around 710, worked as an abbess in the Frankish lands and founded a double monastery at Heidenheim in Germany. Her canonisation and the transfer of her relics to Eichstätt are dated to 1 May 870, which is why her name is tied to this night.
German folklore held that on Walpurgis Night the witches flew to the Brocken, the highest peak of the Harz mountains, for a great celebration with the devil. Goethe set a famous scene of Faust there and titled it simply Walpurgisnacht, and his poem Die erste Walpurgisnacht was later set to music by Felix Mendelssohn.
Burning the witches
In the Czech Republic, 30 April is pálení čarodějnic, the burning of the witches. People build bonfires, often on hilltops and sometimes up to eight metres high, and an effigy of a witch is held up and thrown into the flames. Similar fires are lit in parts of Slovakia. The next morning, 1 May, many Slovak villages raise a maypole, a tall tree decorated with ribbons, for spring and for love.
Protecting home and animals
In the old village calendar, the nights of late April belonged to witches. People believed the bosorka was busiest then, stealing milk and luck, so they protected doorways, stables and cattle with greenery, thorny branches and blessed objects. You can read more about her in Types of Witches in European Folklore.
Morena: drowning the winter
A few weeks earlier, around the spring equinox, children in Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland carry out Morena, called Morana in Czech and Marzanna in Polish: a straw figure dressed in old clothes who stands for winter and death. In some places she is burned, in others set alight and thrown into a river. The procession then returns with a small spruce or pine tree decorated with ribbons and eggshells, a sign that summer is coming. The Church tried to forbid the custom for centuries. A Polish synod banned it in 1420, and it survived anyway.
From fear to festival
The same nights that once meant guarding the cows now mean bonfires, sausages and music. Walpurgis Night shows how a fear of witches turned into a celebration of spring, and why the witch is still a favourite character in Central Europe. The witch trials that ran alongside these customs were no festival, as The European Witch Trials explains.
Are you the witch who would dance around the fire, or the one watching from the shadows? Take the witch and wizard quiz and meet The Mirror Witch, the shape-shifter of the coven.