Gangneung Danoje Festival

A festival for the gods of the city

Gangneung Danoje, known locally as Danogut, is Gangneung’s celebration of Dano, the fifth day of the fifth lunar month. Its purpose is to appease the local gods and receive their blessing, so that the region is spared natural disasters. It is at least four hundred years old and may draw on rites more than a thousand years old. Confucian, shamanic and Buddhist rituals exist side by side. Suppressed under Japanese colonial rule, it was researched and revived from the 1950s; it has been a national intangible cultural heritage since 1967 and is on UNESCO’s Representative List.

Among its gods are the mountain god, once the Silla general Kim Yu-sin, and the city’s chief guardian spirit, once the Buddhist monk Pŏmil, who is said to have protected people from pirates.

From the mountain to the festival ground

On the 20th day of the third month, city representatives offer rice liquor to the gods at Chilsadang, a Joseon-era government building, and begin brewing the sacred liquor from rice donated by local households. On the 5th day of the fourth month, the festival’s leaders climb to the shrine of the mountain god on the Daegwallyeong pass for Confucian rites, shamanic music and dance; a shaman brings down a sacred branch from a tree. On the 15th, the guardian god’s spirit tablet and the branch are carried in procession to the villages of Gusan and Haksan, where he is said to have been born, and he is married to a female local god, whose shrine hosts a fifteen-day honeymoon.

On the evening of the 1st day of the fifth month, the married gods are carried through the main street to the festival ground, the Danojang. For the next week, each day opens with a morning rite, shamans perform rituals on filial piety, peace, love, war and success, and the Gwanno mask drama and Odokddegi folk songs are performed. Visitors can make Danoje fans, eat surichwi rice crackers and wash their hair in iris water. Around it all spreads the Nanjang — literally “chaos” — the country’s largest outdoor market, with food, crafts, games and contests. A Confucian rite closes the festival on the 7th.