Summer Solstice
In Hawaii, where I live, the summer solstice this year officially happens today, June 20, at 11:13 pm, but because Hawaii is so far west, the solstice is tomorrow for most of the world. Tomorrow I'm posting another solstice event, so I'm going to start today with the celebration in Latvia.
Latvia celebrates the summer solstice with the festival of Jāņi. Traditional celebrations include making a bonfire and getting naked and skinny-dipping in a lake, as I posted last year.
The town of Kuldiga, Latvia celebrates with a naked run in the middle of the night, as shown in the video above that was taken from a broadcast on Latvian public TV in 2012. The narration is in Latvian, but you don't need to speak Latvian to enjoy the video.
The town is known for its 500-foot-long brick bridge across the river Venta – the longest bridge of its kind in Europe. At 3:00 am on the night of the summer solstice, which is the shortest night of the year, a group of locals, almost entirely male, run across the bridge naked.
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For those of you who celebrate the solstice tomorrow, not today (almost everyone), the summer solstice is World Naked Hiking Day. So if you like to hike and you know a spot where you won't get hassled, get out there and get naked!
5 comments:
happy summer
Decades ago I hiked naked a few times with a club I belonged to in Denver. Being awake at 3:00am is not very appealing.
Any Naked Hike near SouthEast Pennsylvania?
This is just the kind of shit we missed, because of the cold war!
The Latvian tradition is that in the night from Jani to Ligo (I am not using the diacritical marks as in "āņ") no one can go to sleep. By the way, at the latitude of Latvia (like southern Sweden) there is is no astronomical night during this period
The sky never became fully dark because the "night" it is only the civil twilight and last only 4 hours...
Don't ask what happens during the Christmas period!.
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