Bisket Jatra — the new-year chariot

Bisket Jatra is Bhaktapur's nine-day new-year festival, one of the few Nepali festivals fixed to the solar rather than the lunar calendar, climaxing around 14 April, the start of the year in the Bikram Sambat reckoning. A massive, three-storeyed wooden chariot is built without nails to carry the image of Akash Bhairava, a fierce form of Shiva, and a second carries the goddess Bhadrakali. The chariots are hauled through the narrow streets and squares of Bhaktapur by huge crowds heaving on thick ropes, and the festival turns on a ritual tug-of-war at Taumadhi Square between the eastern (upper) and western (lower) halves of the town, each pulling the chariot toward its own quarter — a contest that can turn rough and is meant to. At Lyasinkhel a great wooden pole, the lingo, is raised and then, on new year's day, pulled down in the Satruhanta ritual, an act tied to a myth of two serpents slain to free the town from a curse. The festival blends tantric symbolism, the rivalry of neighbourhoods, and the renewal of the year in a single sustained public effort. It is among the most physically charged festivals in the valley, owned and run by Bhaktapur's guthi and pulled by its people, with visitors watching from the edges of a genuinely intense crowd.