Oerlikon's Turnip Lantern Parade: Two Routes – and the Choice Is Not a Matter of Taste

A lantern parade is normally a decision-free affair: you turn up, you walk, you go home. In Oerlikon there is a real choice at the start — and it gets underestimated at kitchen tables because in a calendar it looks like a footnote.

The long route has drummers. That is why eight-year-olds love it and three-year-olds want carrying after ten minutes: drums are loud, the pace is brisk, the procession is longer. The short route does the opposite — it opens with communal singing on the meadow by Baumacker school, runs shorter and slower, and starts a quarter of an hour later, which for families still doing supper makes all the difference.

The elegant part of the arrangement: both groups arrive together. At around 19:30 everyone meets at the Liguster sports ground. Siblings four years apart can therefore walk separately without the family splitting its evening — the cleanest answer in the whole survey to a problem almost every parade has and almost none solves.

In Zurich, lantern parades are a neighbourhood matter, not a city one: there is no «City of Zurich parade», there is the Oerlikon one, the Oberstrass one, the Albisrieden one. In the canton of Zurich the ConvivaPlus survey lists 12 parades; nationwide, 22 entries with 17 documented dates.

6 November 2026 is one of the busiest evenings of the season: besides Oerlikon, 4 other recorded parades set off that night. The densest evening overall is 6 November 2026, with 5 parades at once. That figure comes from the ConvivaPlus survey and can only be calculated because every date was read individually at a first-hand source (organiser or municipality) — never carried over from last year.