Annafest Forchheim

Forchheim's Annafest takes its present form from 1840, when the town's shooting club moved into the wooded Kellerwald, or cellar forest, a sandstone hillside already used for centuries to store beer in cool underground cellars. Held each year around Saint Anna's feast day on 26 July, the festival spreads across twenty-three individual beer cellars shaded by mature trees rather than an open fairground.

Pilgrims had been visiting a chapel dedicated to Saint Anna near Forchheim since the early sixteenth century, but the Annafest in its present form dates to 1840, when the town's shooting club relocated its main shooting grounds from a meadow beside the river Regnitz up into the Kellerwald, or 'cellar forest', a wooded hillside honeycombed with beer cellars carved into the local sandstone.