Anilluminated procession is aprocession held after dark so that lights carried by the participants form a spectacle. The lights will commonly be of the same type, so making acandlelight procession,lantern parade ortorchlight march.[1]
Torchlight processions were known already inAncient Greece where it was connected withAncient Greek religion. Until today they are part modern adaptations ofDionysia festival in Greece and elsewhere.[2]
Snowshoe tramps by torchlight have been held inMontreal since 1873.[6] Processions of skiers holding torches or flares whileskiing down a slope at night has been a scheduled event ofwinter festivals since at least 1903.[7]
During the 1930s Nazi Germany in some of itsNuremberg rallies used torchlight marches.
On 1 January 2014,Stepan Bandera's 105th birthday was celebrated by a torchlight procession of 15,000 people in the centre ofKyiv and thousands more rallied near his statue in Lviv.[9][10][11] The march was supported by the far-rightSvoboda party and some members of the center-rightBatkivshchyna.[12]
In 2017, During theUnite the Right rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia. a group of white nationalists – variously numbered from "dozens"[13] to "about 250"[14] – gathered for an unannounced (and unsanctioned by the city) march through the University of Virginia's campus. They marched towards the university's Lawn chanting Nazi andwhite supremacist slogans, including "White lives matter"; "You will not replace us"; and "Jews will not replace us".[15][16] (The phrase "You will not replace us" has been reported by theAnti-Defamation League to "reflect the white supremacist world view that ... the white race is doomed to extinction by an alleged 'rising tide of color' purportedly controlled and manipulated by Jews".[17]) TheNazi slogan "Blood and Soil" was also used.[18][16][13][19] The group was primarily composed of white men,[19] many of them wieldingtiki torches.[16][19][20]
In EstoniaConservative People's Party of Estonia The party's affiliated nationalist youth movement Blue Awakening is the main organizer of the annual torchlight march throughTallinn on 24 February,Independence Day of Estonia. The first Independence Day torchlight march was held in 2014. According to Blue Awakening, the torchlight march is meant to honor those who have fallen for the nation of Estonia and to signify that Estonian youth have not abandoned the nationalist principles.[21][22][23][24][25] The event has been harshly criticized by theSimon Wiesenthal Center that described it as "Nuremberg-esque" and likened the ideology of the participants to that of theEstonian Nazi collaborators.[26][27]
.jpg)
