Buchenau border crossing

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The Buchenau border crossing in the central Hessian Dautphetal is a five-day folk festival that was demonstrably first celebrated in 1886. The festival, which takes place every seven years, is one of the largest and most traditional border crossing festivals in the region, with around 3,000 to 5,000 people walking through a large part of the Buchenau (district) border on each of the two border crossing days. The last border crossing in Buchenau took place in July 2013.

Around 5,000 people ran the running route to the right of the Lahn on the second border crossing day in 2006.

history

Border inspections in the event of disputes were already common in the Middle Ages. The first documented border inspection in Buchenau is only available for 1665. The first documented border festival, however, was celebrated in 1886. There are no written records of possible historical forerunners of the festival, although the residents already told of the border crossing festivals of their ancestors at the beginning of the 20th century.

The party

background

The Grenzgang is a folk festival, which, like the so-called Schnadegang in Westphalia, can be traced back to earlier border disputes between neighboring places. In the Middle Ages and early modern times, border inspections were necessary when there was a dispute between two communities over their borders. Since land was a very valuable possession at that time, there were often conflicts over alleged or actual border shifts. In this case an official border inspection of the population took place together with a bailiff and usually a forester, during which the border was "officially established". After the emergence of the cadastral system and the demarcation of the borders, this type of border inspection became superfluous, a festival arose from the tradition . The Buchenau border crossing only takes place every seven years and is an absolute highlight in the town's event calendar.

procedure

The festival begins on a Thursday evening at 6:00 p.m. with the gun shooting on the castle hill, the so-called “ Borg ” in the dialect . This is followed by a memorial ceremony at the memorial in the cemetery, before the Kommers and Volksfest follow until 23:00 on the fairground at the Wellerspitze . This time limit, which is also repeated for the following day, results from the fact that the wake-up for the border inspections on the following days takes place at 5:30 am by firefighting. The gathering takes place at the town hall, church square and the surrounding streets until 6:30 a.m., where the greeting takes place before the first part of the border is passed at 7:00 a.m. At the first breakfast spot, the " evenness ", the kilometer-long lindworm of people gathers for breakfast together.

The first part of the border passed in the early afternoon (walking distance almost 13 km). The folk festival will again take place on the fairground from 5:00 p.m. Saturday is similar to the previous day - a distance of around 8.5 km is covered with breakfast on the " Dornochsenberg ". The folk festival begins on this day at 6 p.m. - here again with a meeting point at the town hall and a joint march to the festival square. On this day as on the following day, the festival lasts until the early hours of the morning. The parade through the town will take place on Sunday from 1.30 p.m. Afterwards, as on Monday from 10:30 a.m., the party will again take place on the fairground. The festival closes at 6 p.m. with the funeral of the landmark and the shave of the Moor.

Symbolic figures

Moor and runners

The disguised "Mohr" as an allusion to the child frightening figure of the black man leads the border gang. It stands symbolically as a threat of (court) violence in the event that the neighboring communities shift the borders in their favor. The two “runners” are also supposed to scare away intruders with their cracking whips, drive the border train and lead them along the border.

Other main characters

  • Sappers
  • Forstmann
  • Citizen colonel
  • Male colonel
  • Colonel fellow

literature

  • Karl Huth, Buchenau / Lahn parish council (ed.): Buchenau. A walk through history and the present . Buchenau / Lahn 1972
  • Peter Ihm and Jürgen Westmeier (eds.): Buchenau an der Lahn - History and Stories: The Border Crosser 1992 . Buchenau / Lahn 1992

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Huth 1972

Web links

Associated companies

See also