What are your Walpurgis Eve traditions? Why not write to us and tell us? We’d love to hear about them! Image: View of Carolinabacken at the 2018 Donning of the Caps ceremony. Photo credit: Mikael Wallerstedt.

2022-04-12

What are your plans for Walpurgis Eve?

Following a two-year intermission, traditional Walpurgis Eve celebrations are about to make a comeback in Uppsala. But Walpurgis Eve is different for everyone. What is yours usually like?

Walpurgis Eve is the year’s biggest student festival in Uppsala, and might even be the city’s biggest. What was once a spring festival to celebrate the shift from winter to summer combined with celebrations of the Catholic Saint Walpurga, Uppsala’s Walpurgis Eve festivities have now grown into a celebration that can last for several days.

White-water canoeing, a spring songs singalong at Gunillaklockan, pickled-herring lunches, picnics at Ekonomikum Park and the Donning of the Caps ceremony at Carolinabacken are just some of the highlights that many people associate with Walpurgis Eve in Uppsala. Our present-day traditions came into being over many years.

Donning of the Caps ceremony at Carolinabacken

After being invited to by the Chief Librarian of the University Library, the Dean of Uppsala University leads the Donning of the Caps ceremony from the balcony of the Carolina Rediviva building. In accordance with tradition, at 3 p.m. on the dot, everyone dons their student’s cap at Carolinabacken as a symbol of the shift from winter to summer.

Student caps are a feature on at least two occasions every year in Sweden: Walpurgis Eve in Uppsala and when upper secondary school students tear out of their schools all over the country at the end of their studies. The student caps originate from the 1840s, when they were a symbol for male students to indicate their membership of the students’ union.

Female university students, once they finally gained access to university studies in the 1870s, had to make do with carrying their caps in a bag. This was because it was seen as unseemly for women to wear peaked caps. All this changed when seven women from Uppsala’s female student association took matters into their own hands and wore their student caps in public on Walpurgis Eve in 1892. Since then, student caps have been worn by both women and men in public.

Spring songs singalong at Gunillaklockan

In the early 1800s, students would often meet in the city and walk up to Uppsala Castle. It was the highest point in the city, from where Walpurgis Eve bonfires could be seen all across the plain.

The students would often sing songs about spring at the Castle, where in 1823, the newly composed student song “Våren är kommen” (Spring is here) was first performed. This grew into the present-day traditional evening concert by the Allmänna Sången choir.

Another tradition that has developed is the spring speech given in connection with the spring songs singalong. Since 1971, the Curator Curatorum (the chair of the student nations’ cooperative body Kuratorskonventet) has given this speech.

The spring concert and spring speech have both been staples of Swedish Radio’s broadcasts on this night since 1926.