We Don’t Miss the Middle Ages. We Miss Each Other

Summer in Europe has its own rhythm. It is the season of medieval markets, Celtic gatherings, and Etruscan festivals — a strange, vivid collision of history, myth, and modern longing. In valleys, along rivers, and in small towns, these events return year after year, growing larger, louder, and more magnetic.

They are, without exaggeration, a spectacle. There are stages with medieval music and Irish step dancing, fire labyrinths glowing in the dusk, and evening processions led by bagpipes and drums. You can try archery or axe throwing. You can wander through tent camps where people, dressed in garments of another age, demonstrate crafts as if time had folded in on itself.

There are tarot readers and rune casters. There is food cooked over open flames — food that demands patience. People stand in line for thirty minutes, sometimes an hour, waiting for a chicken to slowly turn over fire. It is served on cardboard plates alongside lentil and spelt soups, tomatoes, basil, grilled skewers. Along the riverbanks, where the water offers relief from the oppressive heat, stalls sell everything from fantasy-inspired medieval dresses to skirts made from recycled Indian sari silk, handmade jewelry, local wine, beer, honey, and mead. And everywhere, the small spiritual marketplace of the modern druid: incense, rune stones, crystals, books.

It is not just an event. It is an atmosphere.

The Scent of Something Older

The air itself feels different — thick with smoke, dust, and something harder to name. It fills the entire valley, clings to your clothes, stays with you long after you leave. Every year, more people come. Some arrive as spectators, others as participants in costume.

You see men in kilts — more than you would ever expect outside Scotland. Women in wide, flowing skirts, many freed from the constraints of modern dress, wearing flower crowns in loose curls. Faces painted for war or ritual. Bare feet on dry earth. It feels less like a festival and more like a gathering. Almost like a family reunion you didn’t know you belonged to.

The Echo Beneath the Surface

Something deeper is being touched here. Not nostalgia in the simple sense, but something closer to instinct — something buried under layers of modern life, social media, work schedules, and the endless negotiation of identity. Sometimes even beneath a thick layer of woke, telling us what to believe or say, blurring the lines of what we feel to be deeply masculine or feminine. Where every impulse is immediately checked, translated, corrected, and neutralized.

These festivals allow people to step into those archetypes that feel both theatrical and strangely authentic. Men present themselves as warriors, as if honor and battle still defined them, as if Valhalla were not just a myth but a destination. Women move through the space in a celebration of femininity that feels elemental, almost ritualistic.

It is easy to dismiss this as roleplay. But that would miss the point. What emerges here is not historical accuracy — it is emotional truth. An echo of something older than modern categories.

A Longing We Don’t Talk About

What these gatherings awaken is not a desire to return to the past, but a longing for what seems absent in the present.

Community, first of all. Not the abstract, digital kind, but the physical reality of shared space. Women together. Men together. Groups gathered around fire at night, making music, telling stories, passing down myths. Work that has visible results — the harvest, the craft, the meal.

There is also a longing for rhythm. A life structured not by notifications and deadlines, but by seasons, by daylight, by weather. Something we traded away for climate-controlled offices, overheated factories, and artificial light that erases the boundaries of day and night.

At these festivals, something unusual happens: people talk to each other. Strangers in line for food start conversations. Tables are shared because there is not enough space. Music comes from instruments, not from playlists. People dance — not carefully, not performatively, but wildly, freely.

And perhaps most striking of all: very few people are looking at their phones.

A Temporary Exit

Maybe that is what these events really offer. Not an escape into the past, but a temporary exit from the present.

A pause from the quiet isolation of modern life, where connection is often mediated through screens. A break from the fragmentation that defines so much of contemporary existence. From the constant influence of negative news, self-optimization, political manipulation from every direction and comparison.

Maybe we need more of the Middle Ages and less of 2026. We do not miss the plague, the dirt or the social injustice of the Middle Ages. But we miss the conditions that made people feel connected, necessary, and embedded in something larger than themselves.

What these festivals reveal, with surprising clarity, is not who we were — but what we are missing.

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This post was previously published on Notes from the Anthropocene.

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