Gion Matsuri: a thousand summers

According to Yasaka Shrine, the festival began in 869, when epidemics swept the capital and other provinces: sixty-six halberds — one for each province of the time — were raised, and portable shrines were sent from Gion-sha to the Shinsen-en garden in prayer for deliverance. The rite was first known as goryō-e.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs explains that the festival took shape as a procession of yama and hoko floats in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and that by the late sixteenth century the townspeople were adorning them with sumptuous textiles and metalwork.

The rites begin with Kippu-iri on July 1 and continue through Yoiyama, the first and second float processions and the procession of the portable shrines, closing with the Ekijinja Nagoshi-sai on July 31. From the lottery that sets the order of the procession to the building of the floats, the float rites are carried by each neighbourhood's own organisation, the chōjū.

The 'Float Ceremony of the Kyoto Gion Festival' is a national Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property; it was inscribed on UNESCO's list in 2009 and extended in 2016 as part of 'Yama, Hoko, Yatai'. Beneath the splendour of the procession lies, still, a prayer to keep epidemic and misfortune at bay.