PicoElise: Le Roi De L'Oiseau

The Roi de l'Oiseau is Puy-en-Velay's biggest event. It has occurred every year for the past thirty or so, and lasts for five days. It's like an extremely special kind of Halloween, without the candy. The whole town launches itself into a recreation of Renaissance times. Costumes, markets, and activities all reflect the enthusiasm with which almost everyone participates.

For many, The Roi de L’Oiseau seems to be also an official, city-sponsored “merde” show. The sheer quantity of broken glass on cobblestoned streets and once white (but now party-fouled) medieval smocks is astounding. Wandering through the streets, it feels like dozens of strangers offer this wide-eyed and innocent foreigner hypocras, the official drink of the event. It’s a pungent blend of wine, pears, cloves, and mystery spices that’s fabricated by the tons and then dispersed through town in glass bottles tied around young peoples’ necks with string. There is a medieval ball, which is essentially a frat party in ambiance except for the kids, old people, medieval bands, and medieval dancing that’s dictated to the crowd by a savvy, highly specialized DJ. Everyone is in costume, whether elaborate or thrown together, and if you’re not, you must feel terribly out of place.The party rages on until the wee hours of the night, until drunkards who fell asleep in the middle of the streets are awakened by their equally drunk comrades to walk home. There are camps where the hardcore participants sleep in giant, authentic tents. At night, our affiliated camp, “les guardiens du feu,” hosts a dinner where eighty people sit around a circle of narrow tables drinking, screaming words to their favorite drinking chants, and taking a break from drinking to eat soup cooked in huge cauldrons over a fire. The meal is lit with candles stuck into the tops of old hypocras bottles.

Hopefully the following pictures will give you a taste for what my experience was like.