A HARE KRISHNA festival with strong participation from Ireland’s Indian communities was held in Dublin and Belfast last weekend.
The Rathayatra Festival has been celebrated in India for over 5,000 years, and is now embraced annually by the people of many international cities such as London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles.
Rathayatra is a voluntary and non-profit community event organised by members of the Hare Krishna faith, which has many Indian believers.
This year the festival in Dublin featured a huge chariot pulled by hand accompanied by singing, chanting, drums, cymbals, and dancing. It culminated in an afternoon of music, drama, cultural tradition and a delicious vegetarian feast in Dublin’s St Stephen’s Green.
One of the special guests who attended the Belfast and Dublin events was Bhaktimarg Swami, the ‘Walking Monk’ famous for walking across Canada multiple times and who was in Ireland as part of his European walking tour.
He walks approximately 35km a day, chanting japa on his prayer beads and experiencing the country as it really is. He has already walked across Canada (the second biggest country in the world) three times, and during his visit to Ireland he took the coastal route from Belfast to Cork.
