Sitka's Alaska Day Week Climbs the Same Hill Twice
September 17, 2026
September 17, 2026
On October 18, 1867, Russian and American delegations met atop Castle Hill at precisely half past three in the afternoon to lower one flag and raise another. Sitka has restaged that moment ever since, in wool coats and period rifles, and photographers including the Daily Sitka Sentinel's James Poulson have documented it year after year. Anyone who has only seen the photo could be forgiven for thinking this is the whole story of Alaska Day: a single reenactment, a single afternoon, a single town looking backward for an hour before getting on with October.
It isn't the whole story. Since 2017, a second gathering has claimed the same hill around the same date, and nobody put it on an official program. It grew there on its own, and in October 2025 it grew large enough that roughly 400 Sitkans stood atop the hill at once, holding signs and chanting beneath a Russian flag flown to mark the very spot of the 1867 sale. Alaska Day in Sitka isn't one civic event anymore. It's two, sharing a single piece of ground, and understanding the week means understanding both.
The festival itself runs longer than a single day, even though October 18 is the only date that shows up on a calendar. Planning sessions convene at Harrigan Centennial Hall in the weeks before, and the public-facing week typically opens in early October and builds toward the transfer anniversary. The signature social event, the Alaska Day Ball, has traditionally landed on the evening before the anniversary itself, and it's exactly what it sounds like: attendees in Victorian gowns and period dress, dancing at Harrigan Centennial Hall into the night.
The daytime program is built around the parade, which runs through Sitka's downtown business district and has historically been led by the pipe and drum regiment of the Seattle Fire Department, a detail that sounds improbable until you remember Sitka has spent more than a century treating this holiday as a genuinely regional occasion rather than a strictly local one. Armed forces veterans hold a memorial service at Sitka National Cemetery. The Pioneers Home hosts a tea. A pie and quilt sale, run as a fundraiser, has become one of the week's quieter fixtures, the kind of detail a visitor would never look up and a resident never forgets.
Because Alaska Day is a state holiday, not just a Sitka tradition, the practical footprint is real. State government offices, the Alaska court system, the state library, and schools close or release early, and many local businesses adjust hours around the parade route and the crowds it draws downtown. In 2026, October 18 falls on a Sunday, which means the state holiday is observed the following Monday, October 19. For anyone planning around the week, that's worth building into the calendar directly:
None of this is exotic. What makes it worth writing down is that almost every element of it, the ball, the parade route, the pie sale, has been running long enough to feel less like a festival and more like municipal infrastructure. It's a week Sitka has built load-bearing habits around.
The ground itself carries more history than the 1867 ceremony alone. Before it was Castle Hill, the site was Noow Tlein, a fortified settlement belonging to the Kiks.ádi clan. Russian forces took the site and later built the residence of the Russian-American Company's manager there, the building sometimes called Baranof's Castle, which is where the hill's English name comes from. When the formal transfer ceremony took place in 1867, it happened on ground that had already changed hands once by force.
The hill's layered history didn't stop in 1867. In 1959, minutes after Alaska became the 49th state, the first 49-star American flag was raised on the same spot. Castle Hill has spent a century and a half as the place where Alaska's biggest changes of ownership and status get physically marked, which is part of why it still draws a crowd every October, for more than one reason.
For many in Sitka's Native community, the 1867 transfer isn't a clean historical footnote. Alaska Natives weren't recognized as American citizens until 1924, and the land beneath Castle Hill was never Russia's to sell in the first place, since Tlingit people had called the region home for thousands of years before any European ship arrived. Since 2017, a growing number of Sitkans have marked the day as what many now call Reconciliation Day, gathering to acknowledge the losses that came with the transfer rather than to celebrate it.
That gathering has evolved year to year. In earlier years it took the form of a quiet mourning ceremony held at the base of the hill while the reenactment proceeded above. By October 2025, it had become something larger and more vocal. Roughly 400 Sitkans rallied atop Castle Hill itself, connecting the 1867 transfer to present-day concerns about power and consent, according to reporting from KCAW, the town's public radio station. The Russian flag flew above them as they gathered, marking the exact spot of the land sale even as they protested what it represented.
This is the part that doesn't show up in any tourism copy: for years now, Sitka has hosted two ceremonies about the same historical event, at the same site, in the same window of time, and they mean nearly opposite things depending on who is standing where. One version treats the hill as a stage for heritage reenactment. The other treats it as a place to answer back to that heritage in real time.
Anyone in town for the week should expect that the crowd atop Castle Hill on October 18 is not one crowd with one purpose. It's two, overlapping by geography and by date, each with its own reason for being there. That's not a scheduling conflict Sitka needs to solve. It's become part of how the town holds the day, and it has held steady long enough that it reads less like a protest crashing a festival and more like a second tradition that simply arrived later than the first.
Away from the hill, the week carries its own quieter rhythm. Interpretive programs, lectures, exhibits, and receptions run throughout, aimed at the kind of resident who wants context rather than spectacle. The pie and quilt sale draws people in for reasons that have nothing to do with 1867 at all. The Ball remains, by most accounts, the one event where the whole spectrum of the town's relationship to the holiday quiets down into something closer to a shared party, gowns and all.
That's the texture worth knowing if you already live here: Alaska Day week isn't a single afternoon of costumes and flags. It's a stretch of days where a fundraiser pie sale, a Victorian ball, a military memorial service, and a rally about land and power all share a calendar without canceling each other out. Nobody scheduled it that way. It just accumulated, year over year, until it became the shape the week takes.
What makes Alaska Day worth understanding, rather than just attending, is that the town hasn't tried to resolve the contradiction sitting on top of Castle Hill. The reenactment still happens. The gathering that answers it still happens, too, and it's grown rather than faded. Both readings of October 18, 1867, get to stand on the same ground in the same hour, which might be the truest description of how Sitka actually handles its own history: not by picking a version, but by making room for both at once.
That habit of making room, for more than one story, more than one use, more than one set of neighbors, is something we think about often at Beloved Alaska Realty, whether the ground in question is a summit downtown or a quiet parcel of waterfront a few miles out. If you're curious about what else is happening around town this fall, or you'd simply like a local perspective on a property somewhere in Southeast Alaska, we're glad to talk. Request a virtual tour or a local consultation any time.
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