Niuean Cultural Events

The main cultural event of Niue is the Village Show days organized every year and each day is hosted by one of the villages. These show days are full of fun and frolic and traditionally days of enjoyment and usually a show case of village art and craft and it present the culinary skills of the native women folk in the art of cooking a wide variety of food.

Niuean women are born artists and they learn the traditional arts from their childhood days from their grown ups.  The village show days are the days when these pierce of handicrafts are offered for sale. Here is no push sales involved but still these items of art fly off the selves very quickly as tourist lap them up fast as mementos and souvenirs. There are no mass produced souvenirs available at Niue.

The main event of the Village show day is the preparation of the huge earthen oven called the ‘unu’ and all sorts of edible items are cooked in it including pigs, chicken, and root vegetables, local delicacies like fish, crabs etc and fruit.  If you want to see the variety of food and the cooking skills of the natives this is the place to visit and you will see the finest preparation of cooked food.

Apart from the village show days a lot of traditional event take place in the villages of Niue. Unlike the other civilizations of the earth where traditional private ceremonies are barred for strangers, Niuean welcomes the tourist and visitors to witness such private ceremonies being held in their houses. One of the private event is the ‘hair cutting’ ceremony of a male child when his long hair are cut for the first time since his birth to mark the ‘coming of age’. Similarly the young girls go through an ‘ear piercing’ ceremony to mark their puberty. Both these ceremonies are very important event in any Niuean family and usually held on Sundays in the privacy of homes. However the people welcome any tourists who want to witness the ceremony with open arms.