The Oktoberfest, a Wedding Party!

So the Oktoberfest is in full swing, and I'm still full of Bavarian nostalgia. Today's post is about the Oktoberfest origins and traditions, and here is my sketchbook page celebrating the great fest. 

The Oktoberfest started out in 1810 as a celebration of the wedding of Crown Prince Ludwig and Princess Therese von Saxe Hildburghausen. Munich held horse races, opera, a ball and parade in honour of the newly weds. Not a marriage made in heaven, Ludo was a bit of a lad who liked the ladies, at the wedding ball he let his wife go home alone early just to show her who was boss! Therese put up with a lot of his antics, he was very miserly towards his wife but indulged and spoilt his many mistresses, but more about that later. 

The Oktoberfest was such a hit that it became an annual event and the area where it is held is still called the '' Theresienwiese'' after Princess Therese. In my sketch you can see a '' Maßkrug'' of beer, funnily enough we don't call them steins here. Beer at the Oktoberfest is truly liquid gold, with 6 million litres being sold for a price of  roughly 11€ per litre. The beer itself must be brewed by one of the six traditional Munich breweries, the hops (also in my sketch) come from the Hallertau, the largest area of hop cultivation in the world and starts just outside Munich. To soak up the beer, Brezen are eaten, this is a salty bread speciality which of course helps to promote beer sales! Other famous dishes served at the beerfest are pork shanks, roast ox, roast chicken, grilled fish and obatzda ( a cheese/paprika/onion spread) and all of them make you very thirsty. The gingerbread heart bottom right is one of the most popular souvenirs, of varying sizes with different texts you will see couples wandering around with these on ribbons around their necks, a great way to declare your love, and you can always nibble on it if you're feeling peckish.

Trachten is the word for traditional German dress, the variety here is amazing, on the left you can see one of the jaunty hats with feathers and the lapel of a traditional janker jacket. Just as at the first Oktoberfest there is a huge parade of groups from all over Bavaria in their traditional costumes and the breweries take part with highly decorated horse wagons loaded with barrels of beer. The embroidery on the lederhosen or dirndls is amazing very often edelweiss flowers are to be seen, these are a symbol of courage and a love token, both the womens' dresses and the mens' lederhosen are embroidered. Traditional lederhosen are made of deer leather and very expensive often being passed down from father to son. 

The ladies aprons on their dresses speak a language, the language of love or rather availability, so if you are wanting to engage in a bit of dalliance (to put it politely!) here are the rules ........ apron bow tied on the right the lady is taken, apron bow on the left single (or willing to engage in a bit of dalliance) a bow in the middle means she is a virgin (can't remember ever seeing one worn like this!) and tied in the middle at the back either a waitress or a widow.  So there you go, don't know if tourists wearing the dresses know about these rules, in that case better ask first before it ends in a beery brawl. 

Sooo a close up of the happy couple, done from Portraits by JK Stieler, Therese was obviously having a bad hair day in her coronation portrait and instead of just wearing the Bavarian crown she thwacked on a big diadem too, a women after my heart! You can never wear enough bling, as for King Ludwig I, he was often accused of looking a bit shabby, it didn't stop him from having tonnes of mistresses which his long suffering wife tolerated, however his famous affair with the Irish dancer '' Lola Montez'' was even too much for her, and scandalised the whole of Munich ending in a political debacle! Ludwig I continued to make himself very unpopular even with beer drinkers, in Bavaria a big mistake, he increased the beer price which lead to a '' beer revolution'' in 1844. Lola, she was made a countess and JK Stieler painted her portrait which hangs in the famous ''gallery of beauties'' in the Nymphenburg palace in Munich along with a multitude of his other paramours. If beer and the Oktoberfest is not your thing, then Schloss Nymphenburg is well worth a visit,  you can even say hi to Lola!