Sunday - The Chicago Celtic Festival

One thing I've noticed about Chicago is how cosmpolitan it is, so I wanted to check out the Chicago Celtic Festival.As this festival was quite close to the hotel, I took a stroll down to Columbus Drive where the fetival was being held. I was more than a little interested as ,being a "Celt" myself, being born in Wales, I wanted to find out how Chicagoans looked at their ancestry and how they identify themselves. Do they consider themselves to be Americans first, then Irish/Scottish or whatever, or do they call themselves Irish Americans? Every cop show set in Chicago has an O'Malley or Doyle so I was interested to find out more. One thing that did intrigue me was a young lad of no more than twenty who was dressed as you would expect an Irish lad to dress if he was from Dublin. The cliche again I suppose as he was wearing a tweed flat cap, waistcoat and hobnail boots.

The festival itself covered the entire spectrum of the Celtic races. Apart from the more obvious Scottish/Irish connections there was the Welsh contingent, and the societies covering the Bretons of France, the Cornish of the extreme west of England and the Manx society which covers the Isle of Man. All these peoples are covered by a similar Celtic language.

Now I have to say first of all that I speak little Welsh myself. Such was the education system when I was a boy that Welsh was only beginning to be re-taught in schools when I left. There appears to be a resurgence in learning the Celtic languages in schools. Wales has its own Welsh speaking TV channel, S4C, as well as Scottish and Irish channels devoting some hours to their respective Gallic languages.

I popped over to the Welsh tents, unsurprisingly, and picked up some of the brochures. The main Welsh tent was being run by a first generation Welshman who had married an Chicagoan and had emigrated to the USA. He had started an organsiation called the Chicago Tafia. For those not in the know the main river in Wales is called the River Taff and runs from the Brecon Beacons to Cardiff, the capital city of Wales, then out to the Bristol Channel. Any one who comes from Wales is usually called a Taff or Taffy, even if they are from other parts of Wales and born nowhere near the Taff!

An interesting fact I gleaned from them was the explorers,Lewis and Clark, who were responsible for opening the interior of North America to exploration and colonisation, had initially set out to find proof that the US interior had been colonised by a tribe of Welsh speaking Native Americans.

In 1179, a Prince Madog led a flotilla from the coast of North Wales and many people believe that he landed in what is now Mobile, Alabama, therefore discovering America a few centuries before Columbus. Reports circulated of a Mandan tribe who were light of skin and spoke like Welshmen. Many words claimed to be alike in both languages were cwm (Welsh) and kwom (Mandan),meaning valley;prydferth(Welsh) and prydfa(Mandan), meaning beautiful ; and hen,glas,aber,mawr and many more.

You can find out about the Welsh language and how to pronounce some of the words at here.

There were many musical tents and a variety of Celtic music was on show, from pipes to harps and Scottish and Irish dancing was on show. There were also many food stalls selling a variety of what could be considered "Celtic" food. However the Welsh culinary delights such as Welsh cakes and Laver Bread were conspicuous by their absence. Laver Bread is made from a type of seaweed and is full of vitamins. The closest Welsh dish I could find was Curried Chips (or French Fries to our American friends). This is not exactly houte cuisine but if you visit Cardiff on a Friday night after the pubs have closed, this will be the dish that most lads will be getting from the local fish and chip shops!