Holidays in Liechtenstein

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Liechtenstein

A Clock That Outlasted Its Own Alliance

Liechtenstein adopted Central European Time in 1894, at a point when the principality's economy, currency and diplomatic representation were all bound to Austria-Hungary under a customs union dating to 1852. When that empire collapsed at the end of the First World War, Liechtenstein found itself economically stranded and moved with striking speed to sever ties with Vienna: the Austrian customs union was formally terminated on 2 August 1919, the Swiss franc replaced Austrian currency the following year, and a new customs and monetary union with Switzerland took effect on 1 January 1924, dismantling the border posts along the Rhine.

Almost every practical marker of Liechtenstein's national life changed in that five-year span, from its currency to its border guards to the foreign embassies that represented its citizens abroad. Its clock alone did not, since Switzerland, like Austria before it, kept Central European Time, so the country that had reoriented its entire economy from Vienna to Bern never had to reset a single watch to do it. The contrast with several of Liechtenstein's fellow small European states, some of which changed their legal time zone two or three times across the same turbulent decades as they shifted allegiance, makes the country's unbroken 1894 adoption something of a quiet outlier.

The Last Vote in Europe

Liechtenstein held its first national referendum on extending the vote to women in 1968, but with a peculiar twist: only men were permitted to cast a ballot on the question. It failed, as did a second attempt in 1971, when the measure was rejected by a margin as narrow as 81 votes, and a third in 1973, defeated more comprehensively. By the time of that second vote, Switzerland next door had already granted women the right to vote at the federal level, leaving Liechtenstein as the sole country left in Europe still denying women a national ballot.

Change eventually came through sustained pressure rather than a single dramatic breakthrough. Activists organised under the name Aktion Dornröschen, "Operation Sleeping Beauty," a pointed reference to how long their country seemed content to slumber on the issue, and in 1983 took their campaign to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg to draw international attention to Liechtenstein's position. A fourth referendum, held on 1 July 1984 and decided by men alone, finally passed by the narrowest of margins, 51.29 percent in favour, making Liechtenstein the last nation in Europe to introduce women's suffrage at the national level, thirteen years after Switzerland and well over half a century after most of the rest of the continent.

The Day Built to Defy Hitler

Liechtenstein's National Day, celebrated every 15 August, was not simply inherited from tradition; it was deliberately constructed in a single stroke during the darkest stretch of the Second World War. On 5 August 1940, the government formally declared 15 August, already a public holiday marking the Catholic feast of the Assumption of Mary, as the country's new national day, timed to fall just one day before the birthday of the reigning monarch, Prince Franz Josef II. The first celebration followed ten days later, combining a religious service with a public serenade for the prince from the balcony of the parliament building in Vaduz.

The timing was no accident. A pro-Nazi movement inside Liechtenstein, the German National Movement, was actively agitating for annexation into Hitler's Reich at the very moment the holiday was created, and the new national day was conceived partly as a direct rebuttal, a public assertion of the tiny principality's continued independence at a time when larger neighbours were being absorbed one after another. The movement responded that same summer by burning swastikas in two villages and pointedly marking Hitler's own birthday instead. Liechtenstein was never occupied, the holiday continued annually through the war and after, and when Franz Josef II died in 1989, the date was kept unchanged, formally written into law as the country's permanent national holiday the following year.

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