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The Epiphany is celebrated in various villages and towns with religious themes and celebrations accompanied by the local beliefs and traditions of this borderland area.
Spend the Epiphany along the ex-border between Gorizia and Udine.
Take the opportunity to capture a special, meaningful moment in the first days of January by choosing to spend a few days in this area. Because of the Schengen Area agreement, borders have become less defined. So if you are in the provinces of Gorizia or Udine for some of the events planned for this time of year, any curiosity to take a look beyond the former Iron Curtain can be easily satisfied.
In the province of Udine the Epiphany is celebrated in various villages and towns with religious themes and celebrations accompanied by the local beliefs and traditions of this borderland area. The "Awakening of the 'Pust'” a pageant that will be held on Saturday 5 January at Cergneu, a small village in the municipality of Nimis, has exactly these characteristics. It is said that here, on the eve of the Epiphany, the Pust or Carnival wakes up. The re-enactment, organized by the ‘Pro Loco’, (the local association for tourism and cultural events), will stage Pust’s liberation from the chains that imprison it inside a cave called the 'Cantun', where it has remained in hibernation since the last day of the previous year’s Carnival. Once the ceremony is over and the Pust is freed from its prison, the people then celebrate with music, sampling the local food and wine and, in the evening, lighting the 'Palaven' bonfire. The next day, Sunday, January 6, you can return to Nimis, a town founded by the Romans (in Latin ‘nemus’ means forest), where the ‘Feast of Pignarul’ will be held. On the evening of the Epiphany the youth of the town will light the 'pignarul' bonfire, whose flames will warm everyone present, townspeople and visitors alike. All are then invited by the Pro Loco to enjoy grilled meats and other local specialties, together with good mulled wine prepared for the occasion.
Nimis is situated near the border with Slovenia, about thirty kilometres to the south of the Regional Nature Park of the Julian Pre-Alps. If the weather is mild, there might be time for a visit to the park, home to deer, foxes and other animals in its almost 10,000 hectares of land, spread among different municipalities in the Udine province and including the colossal Mount Canin (2600 m) and the only glacier in the region.
Passing from rural scenes to those of Gorizia, a city shaped by history, there are several possibilities for sightseeing, depending on time and interest. Gorizia and Nova Gorica are definitely worth visiting on foot to see the special places of the city, which for five decades was divided by the Iron Curtain. Walking among the city streets you’ll come across several museums with the added benefit of special holiday opening hours. Two to visit are the Museum of the Great War, which tells of life in the trenches during the First World War, and the Museum of Fashion and Applied Art, devoted to the materials and techniques of European tailors and designers from the 1800s to today. Both are located in the Borgo Castello area, a ring of sixteenth-century houses at the foot of Gorizia Castle. Leaving Gorizia towards the Gulf of Trieste, the Grado Lagoon is an important destination, visited at this particular time by colourful characters. In the town of Grado on Saturday January 5, the 'witches' will come from the sea. The feast of the Varvuole is a pageant that takes place every year on the eve of the Epiphany. At sunset the Varvuole appear out of the mist on board typical lagoon boats called ‘batele’. Shouting and dancing and wearing traditional coats made from nets, the witches from the lagoon mists come ashore at Grado to take away naughty children.
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