LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland (AP) – Northern Ireland may never again see a bonfire so graceful or heartfelt.
More than 5,000 people a day have been visiting a hand-crafted wooden tower designed by American sculptor David Best in the Northern Ireland city of Londonderry. The 72-foot-tall (22-meter-tall) structure, reminiscent of a Buddhist temple or an arabesque palace, is to be burned to the ground Saturday night in front of 15,000 ticket-holders.
Best, a Californian famous for building wooden temples that are set ablaze during the Burning Man festival in Nevada, was invited by public art promoters to Northern Ireland partly because bonfires here are normally burned in acts of sectarian division. The British Protestant majority each summer burns hundreds of bonfires bedecked with anti-Irish symbols and the Catholic minority loathes them.
But in Londonderry, a city divided into a mostly Catholic west and Protestant east, Best’s tower in a hilltop field on the east side is attracting Catholics and Protestants alike in an atmosphere of harmony. Visitors are encouraged to decorate every nook and cranny of the tower with hand-written messages to their community and their loved ones, both the living and the dead.
Best says his goal was to make the structure “so beautiful that you give up the thing that has been troubling you your whole life.”