Some of the tractors on parade; Credit: Chronicle.lu

Every year since 1985, the Moselle village of Greiveldange has celebrated a harvest festival, Léiffrawëschdag, on 15 August, Assumption Day.

40 years ago, a group of local volunteers inaugurated the now-annual event with demonstrations of rural activities from a bygone age. From these humble beginnings, the event has grown to take over the entire village, which is closed to traffic for the day as some 60 artisan stalls are set up in the streets. They sell mainly hand-crafted wares ranging from handbags to garden ornaments, distilled alcoholic beverages and of course, traditional Luxembourgish food and drinks. Additionally, some now almost forgotten activities, such as lime kilning and blacksmithing, are demonstrated throughout the day, and a tractor parade takes place.

Chronicle.lu spoke with Erny Konsbrück and his wife, Solange Schmit, at their café, “Ailleurs”, which was the boyhood home of Erny Konsbrück in the 1950s, and indeed has been a café (and formerly also a grocer) since the 19th century, always in his family’s hands. He explained the religious origins of the festival in which a sheaf of 30 medicinal and garden herbs, a carrot and an onion, known as a Wësch, are blessed by the priest for the parishioners, who then take their sheaves and hang them in their homes for good luck. This practice used to be widespread but had almost completely ceased until Greiveldange re-emphasised it as the focal point of the day.

Mr Konsbrück went on to explain that there is an “army” of around 100 volunteers of the Gréiweldenger Leit, the village residents’ organisation which puts on the various events in the village during the year, who spend the week leading up to the event installing the infrastructure, and then another three days afterwards reverting the village to its tranquil default. Both he and Mrs Schmit stressed that the planning work for next year's event starts immediately, so effectively the preparation is an all-year task.

With between 5,000 and 6,000 visitors to the event every year, the village population of around 1,000 people swells sixfold during the day, thus the success of the occasion is heavily dependent on the meticulous planning that goes into it.

In keeping with the religious origins of the event, the money taken from the sale of the Wësch sheaves is donated each year to a different charity. This year the benefitting organisation is the leukaemia charity Plooschter Projet, which aims to carry out awareness campaigns relating to blood cancers and to encourage people to register as stem cell donors.



Erny Konsbrück and Solange Schmit - Café Ailleurs