Ringing out the old year

Costumes and bells are the best medicine against evil spirits swissinfo.ch

The end of the old year and start of the New Year is not a good time to be in the Swiss Alps - if you happen to be an evil spirit, that is.

In several Swiss towns and villages, from Appenzell in the east to the Bernese Oberland in the west, local folk take part in the exorcism ceremony. They march through the streets during these long, cold winter nights dressed in frightening costumes and ringing cowbells.

It is the only way they believe they can rid their villages of evil spirits, or at the very least, drive them higher into the mountains.

And the pagan rituals are more popular today than they ever were, even going back to the Middle Ages when it was fashionable to blame plagues, natural disasters and other horrible things on evil spirits.

One of the best-known rituals is “Uebersitz” in the Hasli Valley in the Bernese Oberland.

Loud exorcism

Uebersitz begins on Christmas Day in the resort of Meiringen and neighbouring villages, and culminates on the last working day of the old year when everyone descends on Meiringen for a grand and very loud exorcism.

“I think people here in the mountains are more traditional than people in the cities,” says 19-year-old Simon Schmid, who is already a ten-year Uebersitz veteran.

“There are a lot of farmers [in the region]. I think it’s normal in the mountains that they believe in spirits. They are more superstitious.”

Ruth Loosli of the region’s tourist office sees it differently. Where the mountains kept the villages isolated up until the 20th century, helping preserve age-old customs, she says the opening of the villages to the outside world, paradoxically, only made Uebersitz more popular.

“It was not common, for example, for someone to go to Zurich to study but now people do and meet a lot of other people from different places. They tell them about Uebersitz, and tell them to come to see it for themselves,” Loosli explains.

Good marketing

“It’s also a good marketing event for the region,” she adds, with an eye to the tourists who mingle with the local folk that line the parade route through the centre of Meiringen.




Hotels are fully booked in the resort through the Christmas season, ostensibly with skiers – but Loosli believes many come at this time of year to experience the event.

But in a town which boasts Sherlock Holmes hotels, a Holmes museum and statue and a wide assortment of souvenir paraphernalia (Holmes author, Arthur Conan Doyle, had the famous sleuth killed at the Reichenbach Falls outside of the village), Uebersitz is marketed only by word of mouth; there are no t-shirts, wind up Uebersitz dolls, CDs or live television coverage.

It’s a modest occasion. Simon Schmid wears old clothes that he found at his parents’ house – just as his father did before him, and hides his face with a plastic Halloween mask.

He marches through the streets with up to 200 hundred other costumed villagers, rhythmically swinging a cowbell from his hip.

“We don’t know exactly where the rhythm comes from,” Schmid says. “We think it must have been a rhythm brought back from a foreign battlefield hundreds of years ago by one of the many local men who fought as mercenaries.”

Mulled wine

Schmid marches with his large group through the night, every night between Christmas and the last working day of the year, stopping now and again for refreshments.

Curious onlookers are enticed by the smell of mulled wine and melted cheese wafting from the many food stalls along the parade route.

There are no other smells. “You put the melted cheese on bread. That’s the only thing people used to have here. You just had cheese on the Alps,” says Loosli. “So it’s traditional. That’s what you eat during Uebersitz.”

“I don’t take part [in the ritual] in order to impress the tourists,” says Schmid. “I wouldn’t care if nobody watched. I do it because I like it.”

by Dale Bechtel