Chungcheongnam-do

▲ Sabian parade in The 62nd Baekje Cultural Festival

The 62nd Baekje Cultural Festival has been held in Buyeo-gun for 10 days. In the festival, people could see the history, spirit of art and culture of the ancient kingdom ‘Baekje’ even it’s 1,400 years after from the fall of the kingdom.

The opening ceremony was held with the theme performance, Haphwasik(a ceremony that combine two fires as one to celebrate festival) of Baekje Honbul(spiritual fire) and torch-lighting ceremony in the main stage of Junglimsaji(Junglimsa Temple). The Junglimsaji area that the main stage will be installed has decorated with splendid lights to express the beauty of great kingdom Baekje and caught visitors’ eyes by various types of lights and razer shows.

Especially, this year is 1 year anniversary of the festival after it designated as historical areas(Gwanbuk-ri heritage, Busosan castle, Junglimsaji, Neungsan-ri Ancient tumbs, Nasung) to the world heritage sites.

And this year, Cungnam-do wants to make the festival as an urban festival, so they set up 4 sections(History&Culture, Playful Entertainments, Enjoyable Activities, Educatin) to show the festival’s identity, and will provide historical culture, experience and performance based playful entertainments, interests and fun based enjoyable activities and hands-on experiences and learning based education program to improve their image as one of the world heritage cities.

Also, the highlight of the festival is the scene light which shows the original identity of Baekje. They use LED display to express artistic characteristic of Baekje ‘Simple but not humble, and colorful but not loud’ so it will bring visitors into the history for a moment. To express the feeling of the ancient kingdom, they use the golden color light to Junlimsaji and use the comfortable typed light in Suktop-ro area for visitors’ visual comfort.

Magic, play, clown and busking performance kinds of street parades were held in 3 individual small performing art halls, a night parade ‘Feeling of Baekje Sabi(downtown of Baekje)’ by using LED clothes, a street performance for reappearing the energetic downtown Sabi, and Madangguk(one of traditional Korean performance), which was the King Seong’s story of transferred of the capital to Sabi, made Suktop-ro very energetic space. And people enjoyed various kinds of food at the central market, unique creation street and Buyeo market, and at the square of Buyeo market, people enjoyed various street food.

Buyeo-gun developed various programs to improve a quality of the festival so visitors that visited the festival in this year might fell in love with the history, culture and scent of Baekje. The 63rd Baekje Cultural Festival will be more fantastic, so please have more expectations and interests to the festival.