International Bard Music & Fishing Festival 2018: 24-hour song marathon, fishing records and warm meetings with friends from different countries

International Bard Music & Fishing Festival 2018 brought together friends on the shores of the Chigirinskoye Water Reservoir for the ninth time. Thousands of people came together with their families, friends and colleagues to the festival, which is really unusual and probably one of the kind in the world. The 24-hour singing marathon to guitar accompaniment on stages and near bonfires in tent camps, fishing competitions, entertainments to all tastes (sports, travel, intellectual, cooking), charity events… For three days the festival did not stop for a minute. Even at night! After all, music to the whisper of the waves and wind in the trees under a huge starry sky was so romantic that kept people awake all night long.

“This year the festival welcomed more than 3,000 guests. Many are loyal fans who have been with us from the very start. Some are newcomers who came to see a favorite songwriter. We have had people from different parts of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Czechia, Germany, Slovenia,” said Sergei Kulyagin, the author of the idea and one of the organizers of the event.

The program featured dozens of activities: Guitar Rounds song contest, concerts of famous singers from different countries, creative projects, banya-wellness holiday Lezenkі, a cooking fest, a beauty contest, a ceremony of laying new boulders on the bard singers’ trail, the Charity Running Cup, an open beach volleyball tournament, fishing competitions.

The opening concert of the 9th edition of the International Bard Music & Fishing Festival and the Charity Running Cup were symbolically themed around the Year of Native Land in Belarus that will dominate the country’s cultural life for three years. The international festival has become the best advertisement for the picturesque place near the Chigirinskoye Water Reservoir prompting the development of the local tourist infrastructure. Indeed, the water reservoir welcomes participants from all over the world. One of them is singer Tino Eisbrenner from Germany who came with his wife and daughters. They arrived in Belarus ahead of the festival and spent several weeks at the Chigirinskoye Water Reservoir. They said that they had an extraordinary experience there.

Photos from the world’s most unusual, big, vocal and incredibly creative fishing event in our photo report.

On photo: bard singer and founder of the festival Vyacheslav Klimovich