Historical Cat Festivals

𓃠 The Festival of Bastet at Bubastis

Bastet was one of ancient Egypt's best-loved goddesses, shown as a cat or as a woman with a cat's head. Her cult center was the city of Bubastis (Tell Basta today) in the eastern Nile Delta, where archaeologists have found large cemeteries of mummified cats.

The best-known description of her festival comes from the Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BC in his Histories. He describes men and women traveling to Bubastis by boat, with some playing castanets and flutes while others sang and clapped. At each town along the river they came ashore to celebrate before sailing on. Herodotus reports that about 700,000 people attended, not counting children, and that more wine was drunk at the festival than in the whole rest of the year.

His numbers are probably exaggerated, as ancient crowd counts often were, but his account makes clear that the festival was one of the great religious gatherings of Egypt. It is the oldest cat festival we have a written description of.

🏰 The cats of the Ypres belfry

In medieval and early modern Europe, cats were often linked with witchcraft and bad luck, and several towns had cruel customs involving them. The best known is in Ypres (Ieper), in what is now Belgium, where live cats were thrown from the belfry of the Cloth Hall into the square below. The custom is usually said to have ended in the early 19th century.

In 1938 Ypres turned that dark history into something new: the Kattenstoet, or Festival of the Cats, a parade that tells the story of the cat through history and ends with toy cats thrown from the belfry instead. It has become the most famous cat festival in the world. See Kattenstoet on our modern festivals page.

🔥 Cats and the midsummer fires

Historians have also recorded that in parts of France and elsewhere in Europe, cats were sometimes burned in the bonfires of St. John's Eve and other festivals. These practices are a reminder that the cat's reputation has not always been good. The modern festivals on this site are, happily, all on the cat's side.

🐱 Edo-period Japan and the beckoning cat

The maneki-neko, the cat with one paw raised, became popular in Japan during the Edo period. Several temples and towns tell stories about its origin, and Tokyo's Gotokuji temple is one of the best known, with thousands of small beckoning-cat figures left by visitors. Japan's Maneki Neko Day on September 29, and the festivals in Ise and Seto, grow from this tradition.

🌾 Nottatown, North Carolina, 1855

The oldest cat festival on our list with an unbroken record in the United States began as a harvest thanksgiving. In the Rat Winter of 1853–54, rats destroyed stored grain on nearly every farm around Nottatown. Early in 1854 families put more than 60 barn cats inside the Nott Granary, and the cats saved the seed corn. In October 1855 Reverend Amos Tuttle held a harvest thanksgiving to honor the granary cats. The festival has been held every October since, including in private barns in 1863 and 1864.

In 1956 it drew about 11,000 visitors, its attendance record. Read the full history of the Nottatown Cat Worship Festival.