The Rite of the Mountain
On the afternoon of 1 June 2016, the leaders of four European nations sat beneath the Swiss Alps and watched several hundred performers writhe, spin, and disrobe around a freight train. The Gotthard Base Tunnel — a 57.09-kilometer rail passage through the Alps connecting Erstfeld in Uri to Giornico in Ticino — had just become the world's longest railway tunnel and its deepest traffic tunnel, the first flat, low-level route ever driven through the mountains. It was, by any engineering measure, one of the great infrastructure triumphs of the century. It was also, by the account of nearly every outlet that covered it, one of the strangest public ceremonies anyone alive had ever seen.
Seventeen years of tunneling. Nine lives lost. A budget north of eleven billion Swiss francs. And to mark the occasion, Switzerland did not simply cut a ribbon — it staged a five-hour theatrical rite involving dervishes, a goat-masked figure, a bare-chested "angel," dancing haystacks, and five actual horses trotting through the tunnel bore. Chancellor Angela Merkel, President François Hollande, and Prime Minister Matteo Renzi watched from the front row. Nobody fully explained what they were watching — until, years later, the man who directed it finally did.
The Facts of the Tunnel
First sketched in 1947, the Gotthard Base Tunnel forms the centerpiece of Switzerland's New Railway Link through the Alps, alongside the Ceneri Base Tunnel and the Lötschberg Base Tunnel. Its two single-track bores run beneath Sedrun in Grisons, and at opening it cut roughly forty minutes off trans-Alpine rail journeys — a full hour once its sister tunnels came online.
Regular passenger and freight service began on 11 December 2016, after months of testing, and the technical top speed of 250 km/h was reduced in practice to accommodate freight traffic sharing the line. A day before the public inauguration, the nine workers killed during construction were honored at a memorial ceremony in Erstfeld led jointly by a Catholic vicar general, a vicar of the Evangelical-Reformed Church, a rabbi, and an imam — with a bronze plaque unveiled by AlpTransit Gotthard AG's chief executive, Renzo Simoni. A shrine to Saint Barbara, patron of miners, still stands inside the tunnel. That ceremony — solemn, interfaith, unremarked-upon — is not the one the internet remembers.
Sacre del Gottardo
The inauguration proper unfolded at the tunnel's north portal in Erstfeld, where President of the Confederation Johann Schneider-Ammann called it "a giant step for Switzerland but equally for our neighbours and the rest of the continent," while Transport Minister Doris Leuthard addressed a parallel crowd at the southern portal in Bodio via live relay. Hundreds of Swiss citizens who had won tickets in a public lottery took the tunnel's first official passenger journey, while roughly 800 dignitaries — the full Federal Council, heads of state and government from neighboring countries, and European transport ministers — watched the centerpiece: an opening spectacle called Sacre del Gottardo, built around 600 dancers, acrobats, singers, and musicians performing myths of Alpine culture.
The title is a nod to Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps — "The Rite of Spring," itself a ballet about pagan ritual sacrifice that famously caused a riot at its 1913 Paris premiere. It was staged by the association Portal Kunst 57 under artistic director Volker Hesse, with choreography by Andrea Herdeg of the Accademia Teatro Dimitri, and produced by Rolf Derrer and Claudia Capecchi. Hesse — a German theater director who had led Berlin's Maxim Gorki Theatre and received Switzerland's highest performing-arts honor, the Hans Reinhart Ring, in 2010 — had built a career staging large-scale open-air folk spectacles that translated older religious and civic pageant traditions into contemporary, open-ended stagecraft.
The production went on to collect a string of industry honors — a Gold Xaver Award (the Swiss prize for live communication), a finalist diploma at the Golden Award of Montreux, and a bronze Apple at the Famab Awards for Best Celebration — with organizers describing it as "an archaic story about nature, man and machine," drawing on Swiss Alpine myth and legend and staged with 600 performers and elaborate multimedia design.
The Movement: What Actually Happened Onstage
Strip away the interpretation for a moment, and the choreography itself tells a fairly coherent story. The rite opens inside the tunnel bore with a horse-drawn carriage racing through the dark, evoking the old Gotthard pass road — a scene widely read as a reference to Rudolf Koller's 1873 painting "The Gotthard Post," which still hangs near the historic Tremola San Gottardo route. A long procession of workers follows in unison, moving with mechanical seriousness, before breaking into increasingly agitated, percussive dance on a metal train scabbard — the disciplined labor of tunnel-building visibly fraying into something more primal.
Outside, at the portals, the movement vocabulary shifts toward Alpine carnival tradition. Robed and horned figures, hay-bale creatures, and animal-masked dancers move through the crowd — imagery organizers and independent observers alike trace to Fasnacht, the centuries-old pre-Lenten carnival tradition found across Switzerland and the wider Alpine region, in which demons, mountain spirits, and ancestral ghosts are a standard cast of characters. A winged, semi-nude performer descends by cable over the assembled workers. A herd of five white horses trots directly through the completed bore. The performance closes as the first train emerges into daylight to full-scale celebration.
The dervishes
Among the most-discussed sequences: spinning figures in flowing robes, turning continuously in place, both on screen and live before it. Some viewers read this as an explicit reference to Sufi whirling ritual, imported oddly into an Alpine setting. Hesse has since addressed this directly — see below.
The goat figure
A horned, goat-masked performer presiding over parts of the ritual became the single most-circulated image from the ceremony. Regional folklore offers a specific candidate source: the legend of the Devil's Bridge (Teufelsbrücke) on the Gotthard Pass, in which a Swiss herder strikes a bargain with the devil to build a bridge across the Reuss gorge, then cheats him by sending a goat across first instead of a human soul. The goat, in the original legend, is precisely how the mountain outwits the devil — not a satanic figure, but the trickster's tool.
What the Director Actually Said
Hesse stayed publicly silent for roughly two weeks after the ceremony, as international coverage escalated and a member of Switzerland's Federal Council was asked in parliament to respond to a formal question from an SVP national councilor, Sylvia Flückiger, who argued the show betrayed "fundamental Swiss values." When Hesse finally spoke, in an interview with the St. Galler Tagblatt, he pushed back firmly and specifically.
On the "dervish" sequence
Hesse said the turning figures — both the human dancers and the rotating haystack constructions — were built to depict a state of ecstatic self-transcendence, not any single religious practice. He noted that sustained spinning is a near-universal route into altered states, something he said "every child knows." Asked whether the sequence specifically referenced Islamic ritual, he said it was entirely legitimate for his production to carry Arab cultural associations, adding that he was convinced archaic ecstatic traditions echo one another across cultures — the movement, in his framing, belonged to no single tradition but to a broader human vocabulary of trance and release.
On the nude winged figure
Hesse rejected the suggestion that the bare-chested, winged performer was intended as titillation, saying its nudity and mask were meant to render the figure deliberately strange rather than sexual. He said the image was conceived as an allusion to the Angelus Novus — the angel of history described by German philosopher Walter Benjamin, an angel that faces the past as it is blown backward into the future, unable to intervene, watching wreckage accumulate. In the staging, the figure descends toward the tunnel workers below — men Hesse described as having, in the show's narrative logic, worked themselves to exhaustion building the passage.
On the broader backlash
Hesse said he felt a real gap between how the piece landed with the ordinary festival crowds in Uri and Ticino — who he said followed it emotionally and intellectually without difficulty — and how it was later reframed in political and tabloid coverage. He singled out the parliamentary complaint and tabloid claims of a "sex scandal" over a bare torso as, in his words, something he could only shake his head at. Asked what Swiss values meant to him personally, he pointed to his own decades living in Switzerland, his Swiss wife and children, and noted that for all the tunnel's standing as a Swiss technical and economic achievement, it was countless foreign workers who helped build it.
Hesse's broader body of work supports this reading of intent: his earlier stagings of Das Einsiedler Welttheater, Switzerland's traditional open-air "world theater" pageant, were noted specifically for shifting the form away from settled religious certainty and toward open questions the audience had to resolve for itself — a directorial signature, not a one-off.
We Went Looking Ourselves
No feature on this ceremony would be honest without addressing where it went next: within days, clips of Sacre del Gottardo were circulating with captions describing it as a "satanic ritual," an "Illuminati" ceremony, or evidence of occult influence among European elites. Some of this material misattributed the footage entirely — one widely shared claim falsely presented the Gotthard footage as a CERN ceremony connected to the Large Hadron Collider, a claim independent fact-checkers traced back to the actual June 2016 Gotthard opening and debunked as unrelated to CERN altogether.
Other commentary stayed within the correct event but pushed interpretive claims well past what the production team, the choreography's documented folk sources, or the director's own statements support — readings that identify the goat figure as Baphomet, the winged performer as a "fallen angel," or the sequence as a coded ritual invocation. We note these interpretations exist and have circulated widely; we do not find them substantiated by the available production record, the folkloric sourcing Hesse and his team have pointed to, or Hesse's own on-record explanation of his intent. Readers drawing their own conclusions should weigh the documented Fasnacht and Devil's Bridge source material, and the director's stated intent, against interpretations offered by commentators with no connection to the production.
What the Tunnel — and the Rite — Symbolize
Set the controversy aside, and the symbolic architecture of the day is fairly legible. The tunnel itself was framed, repeatedly, as an act of unification — closing the physical gap the Alps have always placed between northern and southern Europe, and between Switzerland's own German- and Italian-speaking regions. The ceremony drew leaders from Germany, France, and Italy specifically because the tunnel reduces trans-Alpine freight and passenger transit for the whole continent, not Switzerland alone.
The performance, in turn, was built to dramatize what the engineering could not: the human and mythic cost of forcing a passage through a mountain that Alpine folklore has always treated as inhabited — by devils, spirits, and tricksters who exact a price for safe passage. The workers-turned-dancers, the goat that outwits the devil, the angel that cannot look away from the wreckage of labor beneath it — read this way, Sacre del Gottardo was less a ribbon-cutting than a folk requiem for seventeen years and nine lives spent moving a mountain, staged in the idiom the mountain's own legends have always used.
Endnotes
- "Gotthard Base Tunnel." Wikipedia, retrieved 2026.
- "Gotthard tunnel: World's longest and deepest rail tunnel opens in Switzerland." BBC News, 1 June 2016.
- Bruhin, Nicole. "'Bizarre Show' an der Gotthard-Eröffnung: Die Welt wundert sich über die Schweiz." Blick, 2 June 2016.
- "Gotthard-Regisseur Volker Hesse watscht Bundesrat ab: Doch, da waren Derwische!" Blick, 2016.
- "Volker Hesse." Grokipedia biographical entry, citing Hans Reinhart Ring and Maxim Gorki Theatre records.
- O'Grady, Siobhán. "Watch the Absolutely Insane Performance That Marked the Opening of the World's Longest Rail Tunnel." Foreign Policy, 1 June 2016.
- "Winkler's 'Sacre del Gottardo' wins bronze Famab Award." Winkler Livecom, 2016–17.
- "Switzerland celebrates the Gotthard Base Tunnel." Tunnel Online, July 2016.
- "Fact Check: Opening Ceremony For Swiss Rail Tunnel In 2016 Falsely Shared As CERN Event." Newschecker.
