Osun Festival: WOW Photos!! Top 50 Colourful Photos Celebrating The River Goddess

The River Goddess Osun Festival 2015

Annually, the Osun-Osgogbo festival is celebrated in the month of August at the grove. Yearly, the festival attracts tens and thousands of Osun worshippers, spectators and tourists from all walks of life.

For the people of Oodua Land, August is the month of celebration, traditional cleansing of Osogbo town and cultural reunion of individuals using their ancestors and founders of the Osogbo Kingdom.

The Osun Osogbo festival has a history greater than 700 years. Historically, an ancestral occurrence resulted in the celebration with this festival. Once upon a time, several migrating people have been led by way of a great hunter called Olutimehin settled on the lender of Osun river, to truly save themselves from famine.

At the river side, Osun the goddess appeared from the water before Olutimehin and requested him to lead people to a unique place (present Osogbo town).

The goddess promised to guard most of the group and bring them prosperity inturn for an annual sacrifice to her. The group accepted the proposition. Today the annual sacrifice to the Osun River Goddess is what’s still celebrated as the Osun Osogbo Festival.

The Osun-Osogbo Festival is a two-week-long programme. It starts with the standard cleansing of the city called’Iwopopo ‘, that is followed in three days by the lighting of the 500-year-old sixteen-point lamp called’Ina Olojumerindinlogun ‘.
 Ina Olojumerindinlogun, the sacred lamp lit in the beginning of the annual Osun-Osogbo festival

Then comes the’Iboriade ‘, an assemblage of the crowns of days gone by ruler, Ataojas of Osogbo, for blessings. This event is led by the sitting Ataoja of Osogbo and the Arugba, Yeye Osun and a committee of priestesses.

 

Photographs by Ife Martins

Held each year in a sacrosanct woodland on the edges of the southern Nigerian city of Osogbo, the Osun-Osogbo, Festival is a two-week-long festival of the Yoruba river goddess Oshun. The celebration, which starts with a customary purifying of the town (Iwopopo) and closures in an individuals’ parade to the Osun-Osogbo holy grove, draws in participants from everywhere throughout the globe.

Osun offers grace to the community; in return, it vows to honor her Sacred Grove. This ceremony is part of a rich indigenous Yoruba religious tradition that began in West Africa and has become one of the ten largest religions in the world, with upwards of 100 million practitioners.