Love your onions? An a-peel-ing festival awaits in Bern, the capital of Switzerland!
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Do you love your onions? A peeling festival awaits in the Swiss capital with 50,000 kg of vegetables
- Every year in the fifth largest city in Switzerland the Zibelemarit takes place
- The festival, which is hundreds of years old, is the only one that Bern hosts
- Hugo Brown of the Daily Mail gets up at 5am and joins in on the revelry…
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Where would we be without onions? Despite being at the root of countless dishes far and wide, the vegetable is rarely celebrated. Unless you are Swiss.
Every year in the country’s fifth largest city and capital, Bern, the Zibelemärit takes place.
On the fourth Monday in November, the city’s inhabitants descend on the old town for a day of drinking, eating and confetti-throwing at this folkloric festival, while local farmers arrive with 50,000kg of onions, some in artfully woven braids.
My girlfriend Elizabeth and I woke up teary-eyed at 5am on our first morning in Bern to join in on the action.
The Zibelemarit (above) is an annual festival in Bern that celebrates onions
We stayed at the Hotel Schweizerhof, a beautiful, imposing 99-room building, founded in 1859, that is an onion’s throw from the drama.
What greets us is blaring music, a haze of cigarette smoke, the smell of mulled wine, onion tart, and the start of a 15-hour confetti fight.
We joined in with a glass of prosecco and mulled wine respectively, a bag of confetti, a couple of onion tartlets, and garlands of braided red and white onions decorated with local flowers. The atmosphere is as cheerful as before 6 am on a winter morning.
Our guide Beatrice, on a tour of the old town the next day, tells us that Bern has no festivals. Zibelemarit is the only one. She shows: even before breakfast, there are a lot of revelers, shabby, around.
When Einstein was asked what he would do if the world ended, he quipped: “I would stay in Bern.” [above]because everything takes longer there’
No one seems to quite know why the festival started. But most agree that its origins lie in the 15th century.
Some say that a fire in 1405 destroyed much of the city, including 600 houses, and claimed 100 lives. Local farmers came to fight the fire, and as a token of gratitude, Bern invited them to come and sell their produce at an all-day event in the heart of the city.
Onions aside, Albert Einstein once lived here and while the Einsteinhaus is disappointing, it makes me realize that I have no idea what the theory of relativity is.
After cleaning up the confetti and saving the onions for another year, the town seems much calmer.
After three days we prepare to leave, but I want to stay longer: the pace and calm are so different from London. So I have one thing in common with Einstein, who, when asked what he would do if the world ended, quipped: ‘I would stay in Bern, because everything takes longer there.’