The story
Esie Stone Image Festival in Esie
The Esie Stone Image Festival is celebrated in Esie, a Yoruba-Igbomina town in Kwara State, home to the largest single collection of soapstone carvings in Nigeria, housed at the Esie Museum. The festival, often known locally as Ijomu-Isin, honors these roughly one thousand ancient stone figures whose original makers remain unknown.
In Esie, a Yoruba-Igbomina town in Kwara State, close to a thousand carved soapstone figures sit at the center of both a museum and a living festival tradition, and nobody, not archaeologists, not the town's own oral historians, can say for certain who made them or when.