“It’s nice to see the Swiss like this before midday,” says my host, Joel.
It’s hard to hear what he says, such is the raucous atmosphere in the Harmonie restaurant in central Bern. It’s only 10.30am, but the restaurant is busy and the large table next to us is in party spirit, toasting each other’s health noisily and frequently.
Like many revellers, they’ve been out early to join the festivities surrounding the Zibelemärit (onion market), an annual event which takes over the Swiss capital each year on the fourth Monday in November.
Dating from the mid-1800s, the Zibelemärit was created by local women who would turn up in the city on the first day of Bern’s Martinmas Fairs, which celebrate the coming of winter, to sell their homegrown produce. The city liked the women’s initiative so much that it fixed the day in its calendar as an annual event – and an early excuse to party as the city heads towards Christmas.
Throughout the streets east of the train station leading up to the famous clock tower, the Zyglogge, are some 600 stalls. One third of them sell onions – 59 tonnes was this year’s count – hung from the stalls in artfully crafted colourful strings, topped with dried flowers. The classic combination appears to be white onions, red onions and garlic bulbs, entwined together to make an edible decoration that, though pretty, is rather pricey too – a string of four strips of eight blubs each goes for around 32CHF.
As well as the take-home variety, onions come in ready-to-eat format too. Onion tart – a variant of the traditional Swiss flammkuchen – is available all over the market, as is garlic bread. It’s all washed down with apple punch or, if you can face it this early in the day, potent glühwein.
I’ve never had onion tart or glühwein for breakfast, but I see no reason not to give it a go now. The Zibelemärit officially starts at 6am, though some market traders arrive at 3am. When I turn up just after 8am – early enough, I thought, for a Monday morning – it’s obvious the people of Bern haven’t opted for a lie-in. The streets are heaving, and the multi-coloured confetti that is sold on some stalls and thrown by gleeful kids (and big kids) over passers-by is already trodden into the tarmac, as though the streets have been sprinkled with hundreds and thousands.
Many revellers attend the festival before work or school, hence the early start, while others will have been granted a half-day holiday by their workplace; over the years, the festival has become something of a public holiday, says Joel. In fact the carnival in March is the only other event of its size in the city.
Onion-buying is well underway. Most of the stallholders are farmers from the three lakes (Seeland) region west of Bern, and they have plenty of produce to sell. The president of the market, Bolligen farmer Walter Stettler, tells me he’ll shift one tonne of onions by the end of the day. But market-goers can also browse through stalls selling hats and mittens, artisan crafts, cheese and other local products. As they stroll, they buy brightly coloured strings of ‘onions’ to wear around their necks (boiled sweets, in fact – even the Bernais don’t suck onions).
I hear French and German in the streets, but rarely English. This isn’t a touristy event – the people who attend the festival are mainly Swiss, Joel tells me. The Zibelemärit is a hidden gem, a Swiss oddity, offering the chance to see a different side to the Swiss people – a side which buys decorative onions, eats garlic bread before 9am and lets its hair down in raucous style. Just make sure you get up early enough to see it.
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