Postcard DE-3081510

About this card (1/4):

We live in and sent you much greetings from Bad Harzburg, a small town with 20.000 inhabitants, at the northern edge of the Harz. The “Harz” is a mountain highland in the center of Germany, and the history is characterized by myths, legends and fables. Many of these stories revolve around witches. You can see a picture of a typical “Harz witch” on the front site of this postcard.

Our witches are NO friendly people. They are really nasty, angry old furies. They stand all day on their boilers and cook soup from spider legs, fly-eyes and toads slime. And they eat little kids! Most of them like them grilled most. And of course: They can fly! They fly with their birch broom, sometimes alone, sometimes together with their black cats on the hump.

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Every year, at the last day of the month April (in Germany this day is called “Walpurgis”) all witches across the country come together on the “Brocken”, the highest mountain of the Harz, and celebrate a big party, a witches' Sabbath. They dance around a big fire and tell each other, what kind of diabolic nasties they have done in the past witch-year. This kind of traditions festival is celebrated in the Harz for more than 1000 years. And every year hundreds of thousands people visit us to celebrate Walpurgis.

At midnight the witches are thrown into the fire. The last 200 years it has been enforced, to take only straw dolls for this act (they don’t scream so loudly). And then they are burned down! - After this act the most beautiful woman from the audience is elected to the “Queen of the May”, a maypole is raised and all visitors starts “dancing into the may”. This symbolizes the victory from the good over the evil, the end of the dark season and the beginning of spring and summer.

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Some people say it is inappropriate, to celebrate such a festival, because in the middle ages thousands of women were burned on funeral piles really, and this should not be trivialized. And really: There was and there is many injustice committed in the name of the Church and the Christianity. But that is not the story of the day. The message of the festival it's just about to defeat the evil and let the good will win.

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It’s my fourth collector card that I designed for postcrossing. And slowly the cards becomes worth seeing, I think. ;-) The card is created with Corel Photo Paint and professionally printed in a printing factory. It’s printed on a 300 g/qm chromokarton and the front side is finished with UV-coating. This collector’s edition is limited up to 500 piece. Unfortunately, the motif has lost a lot of contrast at the printing process. So the area around the Harz-logo is very dark. The picture I uploaded is no scan, it’s the original design from my computer.

At the address field you can see a picture of our daughter Larissa with a little message for the postman.

I hope you like and enjoy my card. It has done a lot of work!

Many greetings from Germany
YetiF