Belgium’s great festivals are medieval processions and carnivals kept alive by their towns — the orange-throwing Gilles of Binche, St George’s fight with the dragon in Mons, and the Renaissance pageant of the Ommegang in Brussels.
Photo: Henri Picot, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
All three festivals in this atlas are recognised by UNESCO. The Carnival of Binche was proclaimed a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2003. The Ducasse de Mons belongs to the shared inscription of the processional giants and dragons of Belgium and France, whose effigies first appeared in religious processions at the end of the fourteenth century. The Ommegang of Brussels was inscribed in 2019.
Their dates follow different calendars: Binche’s carnival falls in the three days before Lent, the Doudou on Trinity Sunday eight weeks after Easter, and the Ommegang in the first week of July.
Carnaval de Binche
For the three days before Lent, the small Walloon town of Binche belongs to its Gilles — up to a thousand men in wax masks and wooden clogs who dance from dawn to drive away evil spirits and, crowned with ostrich plumes, throw oranges to the crowd.
February 7 – 9, 2027Calculated
On Trinity Sunday, Mons carries the shrine of its patron saint through town on a golden chariot that the crowd must push up a steep cobbled slope in one go — and then, on the Grand-Place, St George fights the dragon in the frantic half-hour combat called the Lumeçon.
May 22 – 23, 2027Calculated
Ommegang
On two summer evenings, Brussels relives the day in 1549 when it dazzled Emperor Charles V — some 1,400 people in Renaissance dress, horsemen, crossbowmen, stilt walkers and giants parade from the Sablon to a grand spectacle on the Grand-Place, with real nobles playing their ancestors.
July 2027Approximate window