Mohácsi Busójárás (Scare Away Festival)

The month of February marks the end of the Carnival season in Hungary, and the town of Mohács celebrates the best way they know how — a full week of festivities. The annual Busójárás, or Scare Away Festival, is a lively seven-day event that features plenty of music, food, fun and incredible masks.

The festival began hundreds of years ago, with many assuming it was designed to scare away the invading Turks during Ottoman occupation. These days the locals celebrate the event as a way to scare away winter and welcome in spring. The features of the event are the busós, local men dressed in frightening masks that run through town creating havoc and chasing around women and children — all in good fun, of course. As you can probably imagine, the celebration features a ton of alcohol.

The festivities begin on a Thursday before Ash Wednesday, with a small carnival put on by the locals. The week sees similar events each day, with a focus on music, food and general revelry. The largest celebration occurs Sunday, called the Farsang Vasárnap, and the festival culminates with a large bonfire and burning of a straw man on Tuesday. The final event is known as the Burial of Farsang.

The Mohácsi Busójárás is a lively event that earned a place on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, though it’s not exactly a family affair. The celebrations can get rowdy, and kind of sexual in nature. Locals like to joke you can never be sure whose kid is whose nine months after the celebration.