Today I'd like to take you to another festival I visited yesterday. This is an annual event, organized each year since 2015 and attracting visitors from all over the country. The event is held mid October in Sovata, a nice tourist town in Transylvania, packed during summer but not only.
To be honest, I had no idea there's a pumpkin festival in Sovata and when I found out, knew right away that I'm not going to miss it. It's mid autumn, the weather is still nice, but it's going to change soon, so this was another occasion to enjoy a wonderful sunny day and celebrate autumn.
The festival began on Friday, with a vast offer for every age group and taste, starting with the participants (schools, kindergartens) setting up their decorations at the designated place. There were different workshops for kids, than later in the evening there was the long awaited concert.
We started the journey on Saturday, right at the beginning of the road decorated with pumpkins, at the Crystal Hotel, where I had the chance to photograph the biggest pumpkin I saw that day. The orange autumn mascot of the hotel weighted 174.5kg, which is huge. The biggest pumpkin I've seen so far has been an 50kg one, brought by my dad's neighbor. They are planning to buy some seeds again, so let's hope they get bigger pumpkins next year.
Imagine a kilometer long road decorated with pumpkins, not to mention the crafters who showed up with amazing products for this occasion. You could buy lots of souvenirs, but I'm going to write about that in another post.
Autumn is one of my favorite seasons for the wonderful colors nature provides us with and at a pumpkin festival you can be sure you find all the autumn colors.
Where there's a festival, there's food and plenty to drink as well. These terraces were all dressed up in autumn's beauty. This one was special as it was set up by 11th graders. The stones were painted with typical Hungarian folk elements, like the tulip for example. Chrysanthemums could not be missing from the festival either, as that's the typical autumn flower here.
This pumpkin lady was sitting at a terrace of the restaurant, holding a beer can in her right hand. Not an elegant gesture for a lady if you ask me, but she was at the festival after all. Look at the lady's hand, she has red nails 😄
I bet this carved pumpkin head looked good in the evening, with a nice candle lit inside it. Unfortunately we did not see it as we had to come home.
Here's the second largest and heaviest pumpkin of the festival, weighing 88.8kg (they say). What I loved about the decoration was the presence of autumn products, like dry corn, onion braids (that is how onion is dried during autumn in villages) and paprika garlands.
Some people had a funny idea and this was not the only funny setup. The purplish flower on the left is called the Erica flower, so yes, my name is a flower 😄
These 6th graders had a really original idea about how to decorate the pumpkins. Have you ever seen sports pumpkins? I haven't till now, but it's lovely to see tennis rockets carved on the pumpkin, Olympic symbols, different sports activities painted on them. Excellent idea I must admit.
This was the third pumpkin with a drink, but not the last one. 7th graders did well here.
Another pumpkin with a bottle in its mouth, but that's not even the biggest joke here. The bottle looked a bit funny and wanted to see what kind of drink that was. Turns out it's Transylvanicum, which must be a funny reminder of the Unicum, the famous drink we all know.
While looking at these pumpkins, I was thinking what I would do if given such a task. Imagine knowing a bunch of others will be participating too and you need to create something unique. Carving a usual pumpkin face is not an option anymore. You need to be more creative and come up with some original ideas.
These 7th graders did well. I love the flower eyed pumpkin.
These people were selling pumpkins, so if you were in the mood, you could buy a small one for 1€, a bit bigger one for 2€ and pay way more for the long and/or the big ones. There were also pumpkin hats for sale, for 5€, so if you were in mood for some goofing around, you could be a pumpkin head. I saw many wearing these hats.
These were brought by 4th graders. Would have loved to watch their excitement while carving and painting these pumpkins.
These were 3rd graders, even younger than the previous pumpkin artists, yet look at them, they brought a ship, two cats, a skull and a clown. Looks like imagination and creativity has no limits.
At the moment I have 4 medium size pumpkins on my desk, all from my dad's garden but otherwise I would have brought home a few as I love these, they are so cute.
As I advance with the photos, the age of the participants are decreasing as these kids were 2nd graders.
If I will ever have the chance to carve a pumpkin, I would make a pumpkin house, like that on the photo above. It's very cute. The last time I carved a pumpkin was with my grandfather, when I was in elementary school.
I hope that you can see by now, that creativity has no limits, regardless of the age, everyone was a talented pumpkin artist and this is just the first batch, there will be another post with more pumpkins soon. There are no bad pumpkin artworks. I hope you enjoyed the tour so far.
Here's the Facebook page of the festival.
If you're a newbie, you may want to check out these guides:
