Qualla: Pinksterlanddagen

Pinksterlanddagen: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Khx023, CC BY-SA 3.0. The campsite has a name that sounds like a manifesto: Tot Vrijheidsbezinning - roughly, For Freedom of Mind. It sits in a pine wood outside the village of Appelscha, on the soft border where Friesland slides into Drenthe. Every Pentecost weekend since 1924, anarchists have pitched tents here. No alcohol. No drugs. No open fires. Quiet at night. The rules read like a parody of what a wild anarchist gathering ought to be, and that is precisely the point. The people who come to Pinksterlanddagen have spent a century proving that freedom is not the absence of agreements - it is the practice of making them together.

Read more: Pinksterlanddagen on Qualla

Image: Khx023 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pinksterlanddagen: A Speech in a Dissatisfied Village

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gouwenaar, Public domain. The story really begins on 30 March 1889, when Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis stood up in Appelscha and gave a speech. He was already the most famous socialist agitator in the Netherlands - a former Lutheran minister turned freethinker turned anarchist - and Appelscha's agricultura...

Read more: Pinksterlanddagen on Qualla

Image: Gouwenaar | Public domain

Pinksterlanddagen: From Each, To Each

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gouwenaar, Public domain. The collective Rampeplan - the name translates as Disaster Plan, with deliberate Dutch dry humor - has cooked the meals here for decades. They follow a principle written on the side of every anarchist communist tradition: from each according to their ability, to each according to...

Read more: Pinksterlanddagen on Qualla

Image: Gouwenaar | Public domain

Pinksterlanddagen: The Provo Comes to Town

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gouwenaar, Public domain. In 1970 the Dutch counterculture took a sharp turn through Appelscha when Roel van Duijn arrived. He was a leading figure in Provo, the Amsterdam art-anarchist movement whose white-bicycle plan and happenings on the Spui had electrified the 1960s. Van Duijn organized a teach-in a...

Read more: Pinksterlanddagen on Qualla

Image: Gouwenaar | Public domain

Pinksterlanddagen: A Hundred Pentecosts

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gouwenaar, Public domain. What is remarkable about Pinksterlanddagen is not that anarchists invented it. Anarchists invent things constantly. What is remarkable is that they kept it. A century is a long time for any voluntary association, let alone one that refuses hierarchy on principle. The campsite is ...

Read more: Pinksterlanddagen on Qualla

Image: Gouwenaar | Public domain