Whitsun Heritage Festival
The Whitsun Heritage Festival is a part of the Hungarian Open Air Museum’s annual festivals for a long time. The Directorate of Intangible Cultural Heritage of the Hungarian Open Air Museum, as the main organiser, dedicated the annual event to the mission of awareness raising, visibility, accessibility and also safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage. This year, the festival focused on the celebrating the 2003 Convention’s 20th anniversary, as part of event series in Hungary. In accordance with previous practice, bearer communities from the National Inventory were invited by the organizers. Over the two days the heritage-bearers celebrating the diversity of ICH, got to know each other and also presented themselves to the visitors of the festival and the media through presentations, performances, workshops and dance-houses. This event also gave the opportunity for exchange the experiences about safeguarding of ICH. Similarly to the previous years, about a hundred local children also joined the festival, presenting rich Hungarian Whitsun customs to the visitors of the Museum.
Our intention was to develop and maintain the tradition of an annual gathering of bearer communities and experts on ICH from Hungary and abroad, which served both as a professional exchange of experiences and an entertaining introduction of the elements. Presentations, performances, workshops, exhibitions and dance-houses of Whitsunday and Whitmonday served for visibility of all heritage-elements. The festival gave the opportunity to the bearer communities to exchange their practical ideas about safeguarding, also to experts to enhance their professional network and to the widest public to get in touch actively and face-to-face with the living heritage.
Text as provided by the organiser(s).