Clean well – clean water

An old custom that is still very popular in some regions of Austria and Germany is the well-cleaning festival.

In many places this festival was originally linked to Whitsun. In western Hungary, too, the annual cleaning of the wells used to take place at Whitsun.

The Sachsenhausen Well Festival (Sachsenhäuser Brunnenfest) is also known far beyond the region. The festival in Frankfurt’s Sachsenhausen district was first mentioned in records in 1490, making it one of the city’s oldest festivals. Because the population of Sachsenhausen at that time consisted mainly of craftsmen, farmers and fishermen, they could not pay the levies the city demanded for keeping the wells clean and had to do the cleaning themselves. The well festival was celebrated at the end of the annual well cleaning. From the middle of the 19th century, drinking water pipes gradually replaced the wells, but the festival is still held to this day.

So this festival is very old indeed. Today, thanks to piped drinking water, few people probably give much thought to clean water. Most people probably believe that clean water is a matter of course nowadays. It is not. The idea behind the well-cleaning festival is more relevant today than ever. Contrary to popular belief, clean drinking water from clean groundwater cannot be taken for granted.

It is above all the many chemical cleaning products for body and home, as well as the pesticides used in agriculture, that contaminate our groundwater.

Even if we no longer have wells in the traditional sense, now at Whitsun is a good time to think about what we ourselves can do to keep our water clean(er).