Landshuter Hochzeit

A colleague of mine told me about the Landshut Wedding or better known as Landshuter Hochzeit a few weeks ago. The Landshuter Hochzeit is a medieval festival that is celebrated once every four years in Landshut, which is a city in the state of Bavaria. It is one of the most famous and as far as I know, the largest medieval festival in Germany. As you can guess, there are other medieval festivals in Germany as well. During the Landshuter Hochzeit, the city and its folks turn back time to the middle ages. People dress up in medieval costumes, set up huts and stalls typical of those times, parade through the city playing music, perform juggling acts and so forth. They become a medieval community. You can read up more about this festival here.

This year, the Landshut Wedding was celebrated from the 27th of June till the 19th of July. I was very keen to visit the festival when I heard about it from my colleague just as my wife was when I relayed those very same details to her. It sounded like a rare opportunity that we ought not to miss. So, we decided that we would visit it the coming weekend. Initially, we had planned to visit the festival on Saturday. However, the weather forecast didn't look good and we eventually decided to shift our visit to Sunday - which was a smart thing to do since it was raining all day on Satuday.

We got up at 6 am on Sunday. We told ourselves the night before that we would only make the trip if the weather was good. So, when I got up, I immediately looked out of the window to check the weather. It was pretty sunny - that was the green light. We quickly took our shower, packed our things and were out of our apartment by 7. The train we planned to take to Landshut was leaving at 7:44 am. We got to the main train station in time, bought some breakfast and hopped onto the train. The train ride was only about 45 mins and we reached Landshut's main train station at about 8:30 am.

We looked around for a bus that would take us to the location of the festival. The first bus only came at about 9:10 and so, we had to wait for a while, which wasn't too bad since the weather was pretty nice. As soon as the bus arrived, we jumped on board and reached our destination in less than 10 minutes. We were warmly greeted by three medieval men in one of the stalls. You can see their "we found them" look in the picture here. One of them insisted on having my wife put on a helmet and carry a spear for me to photograph. After some hesitation she agreed to it. The shots turned out well. We then continued on our way towards the "old city", which is where the parades and the crowd are.

I'll stop now and continue in the next post. Stay tuned.