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Landesfestumzug, 20.09.2009

the tyrolean state celebrated the 200 year anniversary of andreas hofer’s rebellion against napoleon’s franco-bavarian army over the past weekend. the highlight of the celebrations was probably the massive parade on sunday.

there was much criticism before the celebrations—andreas hofer is considered by some as an extremist and terrorist. more recently, there was a terrorist movement in south tyrol aiming to “reunite” trentino and south tyrol with austria. the south tyrolean “Schützen” (translates loosely as riflemen—they’re voluntary groups of traditional riflemen who see it as their job to uphold traditional values, whatever they may be) especially support reunification and the political left-wing consider them extreme right-wing. as the tyrolean (both south and north) schützen made the main body of the parade, some politicians and media claimed that the whole parade was a celebration of right-wing ethos.

as an active participant in the parade yesterday (as a musician), my feeling was that there was a political undercurrent to the parade and of course, some people, albeit a small minority, took the political element to extremes. however, the general feeling of the whole event was a celebration of tyrolean tradition.

according to the organizers, there were 26,000 participants; police reports state there were over 70,000 spectators. the weather was perfect, and the centre of innsbruck was packed with people. the whole spectacle lasted about 5 hours. anyone watching the event in town or on TV definitely saw a lot more than we did. we met at 10:15 in the tivoli football stadium where the organizers staged about 10,000 of the participants. this is a panorama of some of the participants waiting in the stadium:

the parade was supposed to start at 11:00, for some reason, the organizers had forgotten that politicians like to talk, so it didn’t start until 12:00… this meant that we had a lot of time to waste in the stadium; some people spent the time drinking:

others sleeping:

the staging had been calculated to the minute and the stadium slowly emptied:

what the austrian army (who’d calculated they could get the whole parade finished by 14:00) hadn’t considered was that sorting out 10,000 non-military personnel would take longer than expected. the parade also didn’t move through town as quickly as anticipated, so we didn’t leave the stadium until 13:50. we had to march for about 20 minutes to actually reach the official starting point of the parade. marching through town with all of the spectators cheering was quite an experience.

pictures

i didn’t have a chance to take pictures while we were marching, but i did manage to get a load of character pictures of people in our band while we were waiting in the stadium. we have some fantastic faces:

here’s the whole album: