For the first time after a two-year break, a Bräu-Kirta with a marquee took place in Aying over the long weekend. The five-day program began on Thursday with a stand concert on the maypole and a traditional costume procession to the tent, and ended yesterday with a kettle meat meal with the Gmunden village musicians. In between, the Putzbrunner CSU member of parliament Florian Hahn used the traditional event to establish a new forum for political exchange: The international secretary of the CSU, as Hahn has been allowed to call himself for some time, invited to the first diplomatic church consecration. At his invitation, several consuls from other countries visited the Bräu-Kirta. Also present were Dragomir Dimitrov from Bulgaria, Ian-Tsing Joseph Dieu from Taiwan, Mehmet Günay from Turkey, Arten Hanku from Albania, Nobutaka Maekawa from Japan, Vassilios Gouloussis from Greece and Yuriy Yarmilko from Ukraine.
Together, the group drove to the festival grounds in a carriage, enjoyed lunch and beer in the festival tent, followed the children’s shoe plating of the Holzkirchen district group and then got a few impressions of the ox race on the brewery meadow. But the social aspect was not the only focus. Even before visiting the Kirta, there was “conference, discussion and work”, as Hahn says. Timothy Liston, US Consul General in Munich since July 2021, came to the conference hotel as a guest speaker. “The focus was on the war in Ukraine and the current tectonic shifts in international politics,” says Hahn, who wants to take the positive feedback from the participants as an opportunity to make the diplomat’s church fair a fixed annual date on the sidelines of the Ayinger Bräu-Kirta: “All consulates-general whose countries belong to the EU, NATO and, in the broadest sense, the western community of values are invited,” says the member of the Bundestag.