Today is Heart Day. Traditionally on the third Monday of August it is carnival in Amsterdam on the Zeedijk. A party for the neighborhood, where men dress like women and vice versa. After two years of cancellation due to corona, the neighborhood is happy that Hartjesdag can be celebrated again.
“We are the sluts of style and class,” says one of the men, who is dressed as chic triplets with two others. “It is mainly a folk festival, a real neighborhood party,” says Diana van Laar, one of the organizers of the Hartjesdag. “In the past, people didn’t have the money for an outfit, so the men put on their wives’ skirts and the women drew a mustache on a lip, that’s how it went. It’s about fun, that’s how dressing up started in the cafes in the past. It’s really about doing something together.”
Many costumed participants have another goal. A man dressed as a rainbow butterfly: “I am a butterfly that has come out of its cocoon, I want to show that I am there and that everyone can be there. In recent years, the tolerance has become less. On Hartjesdag you can show that you can really be yourself.”
It is not entirely clear how Hartjesdag came about. It probably started in the Middle Ages as a folk festival where you could hunt deer in the forests around Haarlem, something that was normally only reserved for the nobility. The name Hartjesdag is said to be a corruption of ‘deer day’.