Quintos 2025
The craziest weekend of my life. Festival of Quintos based on a medieval tradition, whereby the people of the town, when Lent approached, took over the authority of the town for 40 hours and did whatever they wanted, without any type of prohibition. Apparently, the lords of the town marked their territory on the trees and what the people used to do at this festival was to cut one of these trees so that the lord could not determine his territory. All this led to a pagan festival that is still preserved today. It may be the oldest known festival in Agres. They take place the weekend before Ash Wednesday.
Let me tell you when people where describing me this holiday and what they do… I was shocked. My question was “Why would someone cut a big tree and then burn it in the middle of the square?” Well people here do it every year. In my opinion is a crazy festival but it is lot of fun. Young people here are wearing overalls every day of the festival, every one has a different colour, it depends in which year you were born. I had one too. It was good to feel involved! I have met so many new great people and I am sure that I will never forget this experience.
The holiday started on Friday 28 of Feburary and ended on Monday 3 of March. These days we were having dinners, party, disco it was intense. The morning on Monday, the last day, they went to cut the tree and brought it with the tracktor to the square and planted it. After that in the night around 9 o’clock, people gathered in the square and burn it. I watched this big whole tree burning and I thought to myself “This is wild!” I have never seen this in my whole life and I felt really appreacite that I could be part of this.
To see so many people in the square planting the tree and then burning it was spectacular and crazy at the same time. There is nothing like this in Czech Republic so I was suprised a lot of the time. But over all I believe that this is a great tradition and that it’s still happening – really cool fact!
At this festival petards are of course included. If you don’t like them, like me, well … you have to use to it. People, kids, are throwing them all the time. But I survived without any burns so If you want to see Quintos next year you definetely should!
