Cheongdo County will hold the 'Those Were the Days' street festival at Yucheon Culture Village over two days, on March 27 and 28. There is no separate stage. The whole village alleyway serves as the venue just as it is.
The street festival format does not lay out a viewing route. You walk between one wall and the next, run into a program, stop for a while and then walk on, and that is how the day passes. Cheongdo County set the event up, and the people who live in the village took on much of the preparation.
The alleys of old villages tend to have similar physical qualities. Rough cement walls that leave sand on your palm when you brush them, steel gates flushed red where the paint has peeled, the sound of dry earth and gravel crunching underfoot. When the spring sun comes in, the moisture left on the walls dries and the smell of earth rises for a moment. The festival is closer to revealing what was already there for two days than to building something new on top of it.
Yucheon is a railway village that has kept the name it had when trains stopped there. People left after its role ended, and the alleys that remained were quiet for a long time. The way villages facing extinction bring out memory as an asset is being tried in many regions these days, but cases where residents are the ones carrying it out are not common.
There is no reason to hide the tension. The moment a village is consumed as a backdrop for a festival, the alley flattens into a single photograph. After two days the visitors leave and the walls return to their original silence. The point that sets this event apart from other cases is that the people who live with that silence took charge of this preparation.
Anyone planning to visit would do well to bring comfortable walking shoes. The alleys of old villages vary in width and the ground is uneven. Details on the schedule and admission fees have yet to be confirmed and announced, so it is safer to check Cheongdo County's notices before setting out.
Two days at the end of spring are short. Even so, times when human voices mix again in alleys that have long been empty do not come around often. It begins on the morning of the 27th, at the entrance to the Yucheon alleyway.
Event information
Date: Friday, March 27 - Saturday, March 28, 2026
Venue: Yucheon Culture Village, Cheongdo-gun, Gyeongsangbuk-do
Host: Cheongdo County
