3-078-130 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Ober-Ammergau, Bavaria, where the "Passion Play" is performed, 1890. '...once again all is activity and excitement in the usually secluded Bavarian village...in our Illustration. Rehearsal and dress rehearsal will be followed on Whit Monday by the first regular representation of "The History of the Sufferings and Death of Jesus". There are to be twenty-five representations in all...Nowhere...is there so unbroken a tradition as this of Ober-Ammergau. The story has often been told, how, two hundred and fifty years ago, in the time of the Thirty Years' War, a plague broke out in the Bavarian Tyrol, and devastated the neighbourhood of Ober-Ammergau. The village authorities, in order to preserve themselves from the plague, forbade anyone to pass out of their secluded valley. This order did not prevent a truant villager from coming in. Crossing the mountains at night, the unhappy man brought the dire disease with him. Within three days he was dead, and forty fellow-villagers shared his fate. Then it was that the pious people of Ober-Ammergau registered a vow, and determined, in order to propitiate Heaven, that every ten years they would perform a play which should set forth the story of Christ's Passion. We are told that the plague was stayed'. From "Illustrated London News", 1890.