The Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove

A dying grove rebuilt by an Austrian artist who was initiated into it

Sacred groves once ringed every Yoruba city. This is one of the last, 75 hectares of forest along the Osun river, holding shrines, sculptures and sanctuaries to the river goddess Osun. By the 1950s it was in trouble, shrines neglected and priests gone. An Austrian artist saved it. Susanne Wenger settled in Osogbo, was initiated, took the title Adunni Olorisha, and spent the rest of her life to 2009 rebuilding the grove with local artists as the New Sacred Art movement, so the sculpture there is both ancient practice and twentieth-century work. UNESCO listed it in 2005. The festival every August goes back over 700 years and runs two weeks, with the cleansing of the town, the lighting of a 500-year-old sixteen-point lamp, and the Arugba carrying the calabash to the river, retracing the bargain the hunter Olutimehin is said to have made with the goddess.