I
t’s not safe to walk the Lötschental after
dark. When the sun sets behind the
mountains that rise over the valley, turning
their jagged peaks pink in a last burst of
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inside, lock the front door and hide beneath
the bedcovers. The Tschäggä are coming.
The sound of bells announces them: a steady
dong-dong-dong that drifts and builds down
narrow streets, agitating the cows and sheep
kept safe in village barns over winter.
If you hear the ringing, it’s already too late.
The Tschäggä are upon you – ten feet tall, with
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ground, shove rough hands into your mouth and
rub ice in your face. And then they are gone, and
you are alone once more in the dark. You pick
yourself up, slap the snow from your clothes
and breathe a sigh of relief. But there it is again
- the clang of approaching bells, and there’s
nowhere yet to hide.
It seems unlikely that a festival with the
principal aim of terrifying casual wanderers
should sprout in the Lötschental. The four
villages strung out along the valley, way up in
the Swiss Alps, seem plucked from a particularly
sentimental Christmas card. From November to
May, their tightly packed wooden houses squat
under several metres of snow, icicles the length
of swords dripping from their roofs, gingham
curtains hanging in the windows. The buildings
bear cheery statements (‘God is always with you
if you take care of your home’) carved long ago
by house-proud owners into wood tanned the
colour of beef gravy by the sun.
Yet here, a few hundred years ago, the tradition
of Tschäggättä, and its Tschäggä monsters, was
born, and continues to be celebrated with a zeal
that borders on obsession. Every night between
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dressed in wooden masks and animal hides take
to the streets, ready to wreak havoc.‘No-one really knows when it started or why,’
says Agnes Rieder, showing me round the
museum devoted to Tschäggättä she runs with
her family. ‘One story is that on the other side
of the valley, it is shadowy and nothing grows,
so people would come over here to the sunny
side in disguise and steal the food.’
As the cold winter air creeps through the
stone walls of the building, she leads me through
rooms devoted to the different parts of the
Tschäggä’s costume: shoulder braces once used
to carry wood that give the beasts their height;
shawls made from the hides of goat, sheep, cow,
even St Bernard; embroidered leather belts with
heavy iron cowbells hanging off them; long
trousers made from sackcloth. And then there
are the masks, 400 of them – piled in corners,
looming out of walls, staring up from work
benches, each bearing the idiosyncratic marks of
their creator, all equally and uniquely unsettling.
The oldest the Rieders have in their collectionInthe19thcentury,thepriestofKippelchurch
wanted to ban Tschäggättä; his letter of
complaint is held by the village’s museum