Up Helly Aa
27 January 2026 · movable holiday — Torches blaze, the ship sails on — winter glows with fire!
Up Helly Aa is a fire festival held in Lerwick, the main town of the Shetland Islands in Scotland, on the last Tuesday of January. Its present form took shape in the 19th century, the torchlit procession in Lerwick appeared in the 1870s, and the burning of a galley in the late 1880s. The community organises it itself, and it celebrates Shetland's Viking heritage, as the islands were under Norse rule for centuries.
The central figure is the Guizer Jarl, the leader of the procession, dressed as a Viking. Hundreds of participants in costume, with helmets, shields and torches, march through the streets behind a wooden galley built specially for the occasion. In the evening the torches are thrown into the ship and it burns. Afterwards the squads visit halls to perform songs, dances and sketches until morning.
Its name is linked to the end of the Yule holidays, and in the depth of winter, when days are already growing longer, fire adds light to the long northern night. The skies over Shetland can be clear and starry at this time, and sometimes the northern lights appear.
Flying across the sky: An ethereal, bluish-silver star figure made of bright dots and lines, like a constellation: a Viking longship with a dragon-headed prow, sailing slowly across the night sky
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