Bonfires, Maypoles and a saint’s day: How Europe celebrates the longest day of the year

(The Conversation) — Midsummer celebrations throughout Europe coincide with the solstice. Many blend pre-Christian and Christian traditions.

People wear traditional clothes as they celebrate St. John's Day and the summer solstice in Kernave, Lithuania, on June 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Mindaugas Kulbis)

Thomas A. DuBois

June 23, 2026

(The Conversation) — Whether cities or villages, many communities across Europe spend the day and night of June 24 celebrating Midsummer. Congregating around bonfires, or sometimes maypoles, sporting handwoven wreaths of wildflowers or oak leaves, they’ll sing, jump, dance, eat, drink, catch up and celebrate the arrival of the longest day of the year. As a scholar of folklore, I have been to Midsummer celebrations in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Estonia and Lithuania, and I am endlessly in awe of people’s fervent commitment to the holiday and evident enjoyment of it.

From the Mediterranean to Scandinavia and from France to Poland and beyond, Midsummer goes by many names, including the Italian “Festa di San Giovanni Battista” and the Swedish “Midsommar.” It’s “Leedopäev” in Estonia, “Juhannus” in Finland, and “Mihcamárat” for the Sami, the Indigenous people of Scandinavia. Celebrations mark the summer solstice, which takes place in the Northern Hemisphere around June 21.

People gather for the traditional Midsummer celebrations in Gagnef, Sweden, on June 20, 2025.
Ulf Palm/TT News Agency/AFP via Getty Images

Each morning from the time of the winter solstice to the summer solstice, the sun rises a little farther to the north. As the sun climbs higher in the sky, shadows grow shorter and days grow longer. At the summer solstice, the Sun “stands still” – the meaning of the Latin solstice – and begins its progression back toward the south. Days shorten, shadows lengthen, and the cold and dreariness of winter return.

Europeans across the entire continent have noted this simple and inexorable cycle for millennia. Neolithic monuments such as Ireland’s Newgrange and England’s Stonehenge, both of which date from around 5,000 years ago, were built to mark solstices.

Lighting the bonfire

From the Mediterranean to the northern peripheries of Europe, the summer solstice has long been greeted as a time for rituals to gather luck, tell the future and ward off evil.

In Germany, northeastern France and many parts of Scandinavia and the Baltic, people still build elaborate bonfire pyres to light in the evening and tend long into the night. According to folk belief, stepping or leaping over the flames brings love and fertility, while the height of the flames predicts the coming year’s harvest.

Ukrainians jump over fire during a celebration of Kupala Night, a Slavic midsummer festival, in Warsaw, Poland, on June 21, 2025.
AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski

Traditionally, many Europeans gathered dew, herbs or leaves on Midsummer eve, which was reputed to ensure health, beauty and good fortune. Some brought their cattle close to bonfires to breathe in the smoke, or scattered fields with ashes the next day. Although people today generally regard these beliefs as quaint reminders of the past, often they avidly participate, just in case – tying them to forebears centuries or even millennia ago.

Pagan, Christian and secular

Many of the names for the holiday, such as the Danish “Sankt Hans Aften” or Icelandic “Jónsmessunótt,” are connected with John the Baptist, the Christian saint whose birthday is celebrated June 24. Where Jesus’ birth is commemorated around the time of the winter solstice, the Bible describes his cousin St. John being born precisely six months earlier, at the height of summer. The interest in this connection between Jesus and John explains why the holiday takes place on June 24 – or in some countries, on the nearest Saturday – rather than on the actual solstice.

Medieval Christian authorities did not always relish the “pagan” celebrations of the day and occasionally decried peasants’ dancing, singing and other customs. During the 16th century’s Protestant Reformation, celebrations of Catholic saints’ feast days were suppressed, but Midsummer lived on as a secular holiday.

In places where Protestants and Catholics overlapped, such as the Netherlands, celebrating St. John’s eve became an emblem of Catholic identity. The Feast of St. John is celebrated as the “fête nationale” of the Canadian province of Québec in part to differentiate the province from the culture of its English Protestant neighbors.

Swedish painter Anders Zorn completed ‘Midsommardans’ in 1897.
National Museum of Sweden via Wikimedia Commons

One of the most iconic images of Swedish celebrations of the day, Anders Zorn’s 1897 painting “Midsommardans,” or “Midsummer Dance,” reflects 19th-century anxiety that beloved traditions would disappear. Zorn himself paid for the erection of the maypole depicted in his painting, seeking to preserve the picturesque custom in the region of rural Sweden where he lived.

Yet Zorn’s fears were unfounded. Much has changed, but Europeans remain appreciative of the simple and unchanging rhythms of the natural world, including the coming and passing of the season’s longest day.

(Thomas A. DuBois, Professor of Scandinavian Studies, Folklore, and Religious Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

The Difference Between LGBT and Queer is a Revolutionary One

Nicky Reid

June 12, 2026

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Joe is a gay man. A real swell guy who parts his hair down the side, says his prayers, and pays his taxes. He just so happens to suck cock. Well, one cock at least; his husband’s cock. They’ve been married for almost twenty years, have two adopted Filipino children, a labradoodle, and a mid-century craftsman with a white picket fence in the suburbs. Joe is also an usher at the local Lutheran church, works 9-to-5 for a Fortune 500 company and votes blue no matter who. Joe is LGBT, but he isn’t Queer.

Sue isn’t quite sure what the fuck she is, but she definitely isn’t straight. She fucks guys, lots of guys, sometimes more than one at a time, but she fucks girls too or really anybody willing who happens to turn her on in the right way. She uses she/her pronouns but doesn’t really consider herself to be anymore female than she does straight. She wears a dress but also wears a mohawk, six piercings, and more tattoos than she can count on two hands. She lives in a trailer on the weird side of town with two drag queens she calls sisters and a teenage runaway who calls her mom. Sue hasn’t been to church since she was molested, makes just enough cash to get by making kinky videos on OnlyFans, and wouldn’t vote for another Democrat if you paid her double.

Sue has zero interest in mainstream society. Sue may or may not be LGBT, but she is definitely fucking Queer and often feels too Queer for any of those letters.

This is a distinction that I feel needs to be made but nobody seems to want to make it because nobody wants to hurt anyone’s feelings. I get it, and the last thing that I want to do here is play the gatekeeper telling who can identify as what and when. But there is a very big difference between being LGBT and being Queer and that difference seems to be growing. So, I feel that a few distinctions need to be made here before we cease to be a community at all.

The harsh reality is that while Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender are each specific categories of people who are traditionally Queer, ‘LGBT’ itself is more of a brand than an identity. It is a label used to market these sexual and/or gender minorities to straight people for mainstream consumption. Liberals love it because it’s clean and neat and hyper-specific. Everybody gets a letter and every letter fits into a consumer-friendly box.

And plenty of L’s, G’s, B’s, and T’s embrace this brand but they often embrace it more out of a fear of isolation than anything else. Most of us come from some kind of trauma and the Christian Zionists on the right are always looking for new ways to burn us. But when it all comes down to it, ‘LGBT’ is little more than a form of domestication. It is a way to normalize people once defined by non-conformity and it’s often done from above with the worst of intentions.

America is an empire, a huge conglomeration that is constantly expanding. This kind of megastructure thrives on annihilation; the erasure of any identity that might make its subjects less compliant consumers. Sometimes this means traditional genocide, just straight-up mass slaughter, but sometimes this means assimilation. Breaking down diversity and dissolving entire tribes in the melting pot of the newly secular, white Anlo-Saxon Protestant values that continue to define Western Civilization as we know it. There were too many Irish to kill, so we stuck the Irish in our armies and had them kill other Catholics in Mexico, and soon the Irish were white….

This is what LGBT is really about. Turning our culture into something safe so politicians and CEOs can take pictures next to it and prove how tolerant they are when they aren’t busy throwing those too brown or too poor to conform into their marvelous new prisons and having the neurodivergent among us tormented and abused in their crumbling compulsory schools and no-voluntary, for-profit inpatient facilities.

That is LGBT and I won’t have anything to do with it during June or any other month. Queer on the other hand is a tribal distinction for all sexual and/or gender non-conformists who wish to define themselves completely outside of mainstream society. We don’t fit in and we don’t want to fit in. We don’t want to join your armies or pray in your churches or vote for your killers. We have our own families and traditions, and we don’t appreciate seeing them degraded by Walt Disney so he can cover up the stink of his sweatshops.

I would even go so far as to suggest that we should tear a page from that closet queen Malcolm X and take this shit one step further. It is my closely held belief that Queer people are a stateless nation unto ourselves; a distinct, self-sustaining, cultural minority not unlike a race. While we come from many ethnicities, we have the shared distinction of being people once venerated in pagan societies from the Norse to the Yoruba and then cast out into outer darkness upon the forced Christianization of our former tribes. But from these ashes we formed new heathen traditions in the shadows of backroom speakeasies, all-ages punk shows, and musky bathhouses.

This counterculture was literally brought out into the streets during the revolutionary exorcism of the late 60s and 1970s. Organizations like the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries and the Radical Faeries were built using the Black Power and Chicano movements that many of our elders of color were already involved in as models of revolutionary autonomy, and this is what we need to return to, now more than ever.

In a bleeding empire governed by two parties packed with cis-het sexual predators, “fitting in” should be the last item on the agenda. Fitting into what Exactly? Are we supposed to all get married and get rich so we can spend the weekends on some Zionist billionaire’s private island, assaulting children that all available statistics show us will be overwhelmingly Queer? Or maybe we should all just join the straight man’s army so we can drop more bombs on ancient cultures that still recognize the existence of third genders like the one in Iran?

Fuck that and fuck LGBT. This is a nation built on the same puritanical colonialist ideals that led to us being burned at the stake for being impure vessels of gender-bending gods that couldn’t be consolidated beneath one church, and now they want us back! While those same flames threaten to consume their gilded temples of emptiness in one big karmic blaze? I say fuck them and let the fire burn. We will build our own institutions by the light of their flaming ruins. Our schools! Our temples! Our militias! Our nation! Divided under a hundred gods and a thousand genders!

Joe can go ahead and run for president of Hell as an LGBT person you can take home to Netanyahu. Sue will be pegging his husband with a twelve-inch strap-on in the trenches when the grid goes down, living her best revolution as something too Queer to fit in a box.

We are here. We are Queer. And we are ungovernable.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.