Seventy-five hectares of forest along the Osun river, one of the last of the sacred groves that once ringed every Yoruba city, holding shrines, sculptures and sanctuaries to the river goddess Osun. By the 1950s it was in trouble, shrines neglected and priests gone. What saved it was an Austrian artist, Susanne Wenger, who settled in Osogbo, was initiated, took the title Adunni Olorisha, and spent the rest of her life to 2009 rebuilding the grove with local artists as the New Sacred Art movement, which is why the sculpture you walk past is both ancient practice and twentieth-century work. UNESCO listed it in 2005. The festival every August goes back over 700 years and runs two weeks, with the cleansing of the town, the lighting of a 500-year-old sixteen-point lamp, and the Arugba carrying the calabash to the river, retracing the bargain the hunter Olutimehin is said to have made with the goddess.
Osun State, Nigeria
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