Chod Festival Domazlice

The Chod Festival began as a pilgrimage honouring Saint Lawrence, patron saint of Domazlice, drawing an estimated 120,000 pilgrims in 1939, before Communist-era restrictions on religious celebration forced its rebranding as the secular Chodske slavnosti folklore festival in 1955. Expanded to three days in 1996 with added storytelling, bagpipe and children's performance elements, it now ranks among the Czech Republic's oldest and largest ethnographic celebrations, held each August.

The Chod Festival began as a religious pilgrimage honouring Saint Lawrence, the patron saint of Domazlice, a devotion so significant in the region that a 1939 pilgrimage drew an estimated one hundred and twenty thousand people from across Bohemia, a scale that makes clear how central the observance was to regional identity before the Second World War.