Korea’s calendar turns on family and the moon — Seollal and Chuseok, when cities empty for hometowns and ancestral rites, the lanterns of Buddha’s Birthday, and the weeks-long rites for the gods of Gangneung.
Photo: Republic of Korea, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Korean traditional festivals follow the lunisolar calendar reckoned at Korean time, set out each year by the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute. Because Korea is an hour ahead of China, a festival occasionally falls a day later than its Chinese counterpart: in 2027, Seollal is on 7 February, a day after Chinese New Year.
Two of the festivals in this atlas are on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity: the Gangneung Danoje Festival and Yeondeunghoe, the lantern lighting festival.
추석
Korea’s harvest festival under the full moon of the eighth lunar month — three days when cities empty as families go home to honour their ancestors, tidy the family graves and make half-moon rice cakes steamed over pine needles.
September 24 – 26, 2026Calculated
설날
Korean Lunar New Year is a three-day family holiday — tens of millions travel home to perform the ancestral rite, bow deeply to their elders in hanbok, eat a bowl of rice-cake soup and, by old custom, grow a year older.
February 6 – 8, 2027Calculated
강릉단오제
For weeks each spring, Gangneung on Korea’s east coast brews a sacred liquor, fetches its guardian god down from the mountain pass, marries him to a goddess, and then gives a week to shamanic rites, mask drama and the country’s largest open-air market.
April 26, 2027Calculated
연등회
As Buddha’s Birthday approaches, Korea lights up with lanterns — lotus lanterns strung over temple courtyards, a parade of giant glowing figures through the streets of Seoul, and a festival with more than a thousand years of history that UNESCO praises for dissolving social boundaries.
May 13, 2027Calculated