Island of Freedom: Sziget Festival turns 30

As Sziget Festival chalks up its landmark 30th anniversary, Mark Beaumont reports that its evolution from student event to global phenomenon shows no signs of waning, as it looks towards the future.

For 30 years, the old railway bridge across the Danube to Old Buda Island has, for six days each August, become a portal to another world. A place where gigantic inflatable sculptures of heads made from eyes rise from the earth. Where sci-fi corridors of light guide you to arenas rammed with drag queens and late-night ravers. Where the world’s greatest circus performers, dance troupes, global ensembles, and theatrical extravaganzas come together; the biggest stars and most exciting rising acts blast brilliance from the main stages; and on every pathway, you might come across a real-life Super Mario race in progress or gigantic antique steampunk DJ engines honking out cranky gramophone dance music.

This is Sziget – dubbed the Island of Freedom – where any prejudices and bigotries are left on the mainland and 500,000 annual visitors from across the world are encouraged to live their true selves during one of Europe’s biggest, most inclusive, and most broad-minded festivals: Hungary’s own Glastonbury and a unique keystone in the global festival season.

In this 30th anniversary year – marking the 29th event, due to the Covid break – the 60,000 fans at the main stage lose their minds to David Guetta’s laser-strewn electro; Lorde and Billie Eilish’s dark-hearted alt-pop; and Florence + The Machine’s pagan wailings. In the 15,000-capacity FreeDome tent, France’s M83 and the UK’s Jamie xx fill the cavernous space with euphoric electronica while Sweden’s Viagra Boys, Australia’s Amyl and the Sniffers, and Britain’s Frank Carter & the Rattlesnakes bring the visceral punk noise.

World-class DJs pump the rave crowds at the Colosseum – a dance arena built from wooden pallets – nostalgia addicts take in tributes to Queen, ABBA, and Elvis at the Tribute stage, and more chilled Szitizens (as they’re known) wander the giant metal suns of the Artzone or join tantric dance sessions at Sziget Beach on the island’s northern tip. Set virtually in the heart of Budapest, it’s an idyllic escape from the city where minds are opened, differences celebrated, and nights invariably lost in the spin of it all.

“When we cross the bridge and leave the real world and everyday struggle behind, we are entering a different world, like an ‘Island of Freedom’”

“When we cross the bridge and leave the real world and everyday struggle behind, we are entering a different world, like an ‘Island of Freedom’,” says Sziget CEO Tamás Kádár, quoting the social media message that gave the festival its slogan. “Sziget has [had] the same values for 30 years. We stand up for tolerance, acceptance for all kinds of people.”

“Hungary has a quite bad reputation nowadays,” says programme director Jozsef Kardos, sitting behind the LGBTQ+ venue Magic Mirror, “but Sziget remains a flame in the darkness. From the first moment, it was a festival where we wanted people to be able to be themselves and enjoy their life how they want to enjoy it. So, there are no prejudices here, there’s no racism, no homophobia, no xenophobia, we don’t want to make any difference between people because of their religion, their sexual orientation or skin colour or anything. The idea was that during this one week when the festival is happening, we want to create a world to show the people how we would love to live in our everyday life.”

Humble Beginnings
Since its very beginnings, Sziget has been a celebration of freedom. In the wake of the end of the Communist era in 1989, the festival was launched by a group of artists and rock enthusiasts in 1993 to combat the collapse of the previously successful Hungarian festival scene, now drained of government funds. Named Diáksziget (Student Island), the first event had a capacity of just 43,000 and a bill made up purely of Hungarian bands, celebrating the fresh hope of Hungary’s student communities and younger generations.

“In ’92, ’93, there was a big change in Hungary,” says Ádám Lőrincz, managing director of BL Crew who have staged the festival since day one, and one of just two people working on the festival today who have been with Sziget since its 1993 debut. “We felt the change, we felt the freedom. We had two big stages, and some small stages six-by-four size. You have a small hill in the island, and the opposite side of the hill was the first place for the stage. 5,000 people could go there, sitting on the hill and watching the Hungarian bands playing there. It was like a family.”

From the off, Sziget was imagined as a multicultural, multimedia affair. “There were small theatres, a small circus, a movie venue, and Sziget News,” says Lőrincz. “All day, a camera goes around and at [10pm,] after the main act, there’d be a Sziget News show giving information [about] what’s happening [the next] day on the island.”

“Having Pepsi on the front of a flyer would give the agents some degree of security. A multinational isn’t going to sponsor something that’s gonna be a disaster”

In charge of everything from building the stages to putting up the fence; laying electricity and water cables; and putting down the field cover, Lőrincz recalls putting together 20 military tents at a time for the venues at the 1993 event. “There was no power anywhere, no water any- where, nothing. I remember a hundred people pulling a 200-meter-long cable rented from a Hungarian movie company from the entrance to the middle of the island like a snake, that was a special challenge for us.”

As very much an amateur event, the first Sziget ran over budget, earning the festival significant debts. The first attempt to make the festival profitable came the following year, the 25th anniversary of the Woodstock festival, when organisers attempted to (partly) restage it, booking some acts that had played at the original Woodstock on Max Yasgur’s farm in upstate New York in 1969.

The likes of Jefferson Starship, Eric Burdon, and Jethro Tull appeared, drawing a total crowd of 143,000 to the island. 173,000 arrived in 1994 to see The Stranglers, John Cale, and Clawfinger play, but it wasn’t until sponsorship deals were struck with beer brands, media partners, and crucially Pepsi for the 1996 event – and major acts including The Prodigy, Stone Roses, and Sonic Youth began attracting international audiences – that Sziget began to clear its debts and build a reputation as a major stop of the European circuit.

“I think the Pepsi deal helped to develop the festival,” says Sziget’s head of sponsorship Nora Pinter. “It was an international deal, quite long at five years.”

“I imagine it would’ve turned things around massively,” says Alex Hardee at Wasserman Music UK, which has placed the likes of Lewis Capaldi and Billie Eilish at Sziget in recent years. “In ’96, there weren’t that many festivals in that part of the world. Nowadays, booking things into Central Europe, no one has any worries or fears, but this was at a time when you were very suspicious of booking things into what they used to call ‘tertiary markets.’ If someone rang you from Hungary, you’d be checking out if the gig was legit or not. Having Pepsi on the front of a flyer would give the agents some degree of security. A multinational isn’t going to sponsor something that’s gonna be a disaster.”

“It will have a knock-on effect if you headline Sziget. The other European markets take note”

Now with a daily site capacity of 90,000, Sziget could pull huge bill-toppers. David Bowie, Oasis, Foo Fighters, and Green Day were amongst the headliners gracing the Island of Freedom in the late-90s and early-00s as the festival grew to allow for around 360,000 visitors per year. A slot there began to be a marker of regional success. “It will have a knock-on effect if you headline Sziget,” says Wasserman Music agent James Whitting. “The other European markets take note.”

WME agent Rob Markus, who booked Imagine Dragons as headliners this year, was working at EMI Hungary at the time. “I remember when the Foo Fighters went and played early on, I was asked by the head of EMI at the time if I thought it was a good idea, and I said it was a great opportunity. I said, ‘This is going to be a really big festival.’ This was pre a lot of other festivals in that part of Europe, so it became a real opportunity for acts. As soon as you start getting one or two acts, people tend to follow. The Pepsi deal helped tremendously in terms of being able to make the investments needed to get these bigger acts. It was ground-breaking at the time, in Hungary in particular. It was the beginning of changing the landscape of the entertainment business in Hungary and the region.”

Hardee also credits the efficiency and amenability of long-term booker Dan Panaitescu (who sadly died in a car accident in 2016) with convincing UK agents to trust Sziget with their major acts, plus the years when the festival ran mid-week rather than at weekends. “As the festival circuit expanded and everybody wanted weekends,” he says, “it became an important midweek play.”

Beyond the main stages, for many years the broader programme was spread over a wide range of smaller stages themed around musical genres, from classical to Romany. “We had about 15 or 16 different music stages,” says Kardos, who has been programme director since 1998. “We had a blues stage, a jazz stage, metal stage, a pop stage, a stage for alternative music, we had a folk music stage. But when the festival was getting bigger, we needed bigger stages and venues for much bigger capacities. So, the concept changed a little bit, and we now have four big main stages.”

The growth in size and reputation required a more professional approach, too. In the early ’00s, many of the current team were recruited to update the festival for the new millennium. “It used to be a family type of company that used to operate it,” says Dániel Benis, on board since 2003 and head of production at the festival since 2007. “I started to work on that a decade and a half ago – how to create a professional attitude – and it was a really huge task because the organisers would work on paper in exercise books and things like that. Right now, we have multitasking cloud management software to operate the whole thing. We are well-equipped and super-efficient.”

“Some years, we had a stop in Germany. Dancing, drinking, and then they arrive here prepared for Sziget, they have six days at Sziget, and party their way back home. It lengthens their festival experience”

Benis has overseen the gradual growth of the festival production to accommodate the demand and requirements that come with hosting the world’s biggest acts. The Freedome tent started at 2,500sqm, he explains, now it’s more than 6,000sqm. “When I negotiated with the fire department ten years ago, they asked what should be the maximum size for an outdoor tent in Hungary legally, and I thought, ‘Okay, it can be 6,000sqm,’” he laughs. “I never thought I was going to fall into my own trap!”

Where Benis started with 100 containers, now he has 300. Where there were once 300 to 500 Portaloos, now there are more than 1,000 flushing toilets. “Everything – size, decoration, and audio-visual as well – everything has improved.”

Have there been major problems with getting large-scale productions onsite, given the island setting? “It has already happened that we had to crane an even bigger crane from a ship because the weight was not allowed to come across the bridge. It’s a benefit that we’re on an island, but it’s also a really big side-effect for the pull-up because we have only one bridge for heavy vehicles, we have one pedestrian entrance during the operational times, so it’s quite a challenge.”

As the biggest names of the ‘00s kept coming – Muse, The Cure, REM, The Killers, and Pulp, alongside plentiful rock and nu metal heroes and superstar DJs – word got around Europe of this remarkably affordable island of dreams, a rock & roll jewel adrift in the Danube. Combined with press and social media campaigns and partnerships that set out to publicise the experience of the festival as much as its line-up, Sziget began to outstrip other European festivals in terms of its international appeal. The situation, so close to Budapest, encouraged fans from across Europe to treat the festival as the basis for a longer city-break, and the festival even worked with a travel partner in the Netherlands to put on party trains from Amsterdam to Sziget.

“Some years, we had a stop in Germany,” says Pinter. “Dancing, drinking, and then they arrive here prepared for Sziget, they have six days at Sziget, and party their way back home. It lengthens their festival experience.”

“There are some artists such as Lana Del Ray and Kendrick Lamar that had not even played in Hungary before, and the fact that we could bring those artists to the Hungarian crowd is something I’m very proud of”

Many Szitizens from countries outside Hungary even arrange to camp in specific areas together, making for a veritable global map of a campsite. It’s all part of Sziget’s unique sense of community, encouraged not just by the festival’s ethos of togetherness, acceptance, and understanding but by specific programmes – regular early-bird ticket buyers who secure their passes before the line-up is announced are entered into the Szitizen Prime programme, receiving presents and the chance to win exclusive experiences.

As a result of the international in-rush, Sziget is now the biggest tourism event in Hungary each year. “Sziget is not just a festival,” says Benis, “it’s a multicultural holiday. This is a special atmosphere. We’re here in the city centre on an island, so once you enter K-Bridge you’ve fundamentally stepped into another world. You can leave your pain and problems behind, and it works.”

Pop-rika
The Sziget that the outside world arrives at today is a place both calming and head-spinning at once. With over 1,000 performances over six days, it’s a feast of pan-cultural entertainment. In continuing Dan’s good work in curating the main stage bills, booker Virág Csiszár focusses on appealing to the key international markets from which Sziget’s visitors are drawn, including the UK, Netherlands, Germany, and France. “We run polling on our socials as well,” she says, “we try to reach as many fans [as possible] so they can submit their favourite artists. There are some artists such as Lana Del Ray and Kendrick Lamar that had not even played in Hungary before, and the fact that we could bring those artists to the Hungarian crowd is something I’m very proud of.”

Elsewhere, each of the smaller stages forms a vital strut to Sziget’s central philosophy. With acts from 62 countries performing this year, it’s not just one of the top ten most successful major festivals in Europe but one of the most diverse, too, a factor encapsulated by the Global Village stage, a 2019 conglomerate of the previous long-standing World Music stage (the festival’s second biggest until 2010) and the Afro-Latin and Romany stages. Here, gigantic giraffe and zebra puppets dance around the arena; workshops teach visitors the techniques of ethno-sound; and acts from as far afield as Senegal, India, Mexico, and Korea perform.

“This stage and a few of the other smaller stages are still the heart and spirit of what Sziget was before,” says venue manager Marina Pommier, who started working at the festival as manager of the Romany stage in 2002. “The atmosphere is very family and open to all kinds of genres. I try to mix traditional with rock – there will be folk rock and punk rock and very traditional groups. I’m looking for things to let the public be as open as possible to the other music in the world.”

“Our state support is zero, which means we are 100% independent from any government, and we don’t feel any pressure… We do whatever we want”

Pommier’s recent highlights on the stage have included sets by Italian singer-songwriter Vinicio Capossela, Mali’s Bamba Wassoulou Groove, and Poland’s gutsy classical-folk string group VOŁOSI. “The public was like, ‘What is this? How can it exist?’” she says of VOŁOSI’s performance. “People really discover things, and that’s what I want. My duty is to transmit. My challenge this year was to bring, on the last day, a polyphonic group from France. They taught two songs in the workshop because I hoped that in the end there would be a few people to sing with them during the show.”

Love Hungary
For the more colourful clubbers, the Magic Mirror is the hub of the festival’s inclusive mindset. The circular wooden venue – rented from and constructed by Belgian company Magic Mirrors each year – hosts Mirror Talks and film screenings on issues such as identity politics, religion, and LGBTQ+ rights, as well as late-night parties crammed with revellers and drag shows such as Queenz and Queens Brunch Vienna.

“The straight community is really interested in drag culture,” says venue manager György Ujvári-Pintér, who has been running the stage since 2017, “because when they go into the tent and they can see drag queens on the stage, it’s eye candy. There are some fantastic creatures on the stage, and then they can sit down and hear all these historical and cultural facts about drag queens, so it’s always very interesting.”

For all its flamboyant positivity, the Magic Mirror has a troubled history. There were protests around attempts to ban its launch in 2001, and the current right-wing government in Hungary has been putting LGBTQ+ rights at risk. A Mirror Talk called East of Pride focusing on the difficulties facing the Pride movement in Eastern Europe takes place this year, while the Amsterdam Rainbow Dress, made from flags of countries where homosexuality is illegal, makes an appearance on the island. “We hope that Hungary won’t be one of the flags in the next couple of years on that dress,” says Kardos.

“We stand up for tolerance, acceptance for all kinds of people, there [has been] no change in that for 30 years,” says Kádár. “Because we are getting so old, we have seen different governments in this country with different values. Our state support is zero, which means we are 100% independent from any government, and we don’t feel any pressure – we don’t feel any push-back from the government, we do whatever we want.”

“The audience is getting younger, and they prefer faster entertainment, with a shorter span of attention”

Yet the situation in Hungary and the wider world has altered Ujvári-Pintér’s approach to the Magic Mirror mentality. “The original objective was the fight against homophobia and [to] show [the] broader society how we are not different,” he explains. “But times have changed a lot for the queer side of society. When I took it over [in 2017], my main mission was that we should speak directly to the LGBT+. Even if the majority of society has to make a bigger step to understand us, the main thing is to create a point of reference [for] queer society.”

Left of Fields
Performing arts are another Sziget cornerstone. Since starting at Sziget in 2003, Theatre and Dance Field manager Anikó Rácz has seen the theatrical programme shift from enclosed 1,500-capacity black box theatre venues and auditoriums featuring classical and opera shows with 120 singers performing Carmina Burana, to its current incarnation as an accessible open field featuring eight largely contemporary dance-based shows every day.

“It needs to be accessible language-wise,” she says, “and it also needs to be accessible in a way that people can join in and leave it as they like because there is so much else to do that it’s difficult to keep people engaged for an hour. The audience is getting younger, and they prefer faster entertainment, with a shorter span of attention.”

Companies such as France’s Dyptik even invite the audience to dance with them on the stage at the end, a practice somewhat less advisable in the Cirque du Sziget area, where the world’s most renowned contemporary circus troupes – Australia’s Circa, Czechia’s Cirk la Putyka, Canada’s Cirque Alfonse – spin by their hair from poles and recreate the Ukrainian refugee crisis in acrobatic dance, amongst other jaw-dropping spectacles. With four international shows collaborating to utilise the same set-up in a dedicated 1,000-seat arena since 2015 – each company getting just nine hours to set up and rehearse – the rarity of Sziget’s commitment to cutting-edge circus acts has made the venue a huge draw, playing to full houses all weekend.

“The idea is to bring something to the visitors they haven’t necessarily seen before,” says venue manager Ziad Hakim. “There’s always a theme to the show, there’s always a story behind [it], whether it’s LBGTQ+, whether it’s war, we’ve had many different shows. We bring something new, we bring excitement, we bring emotions, all this through contemporary circus. We believe that by having such a varying and strong programme, that [is] making the festival unique.”

“The audience is almost all from Gen Z, which is very unreachable nowadays, and Sziget is very international”

As such an international festival, with a young audience, Sziget has found itself well-primed to strike sponsorship deals with major international partners, making up around 10% of the festival’s full budget of €25million (with the rest covered by
its strong ticket sales). Mastercard, Samsung, TicketSwap, Bolt, Tanqueray, and Ibis are amongst the companies sponsoring main stages and areas, and Pinter sees further potential for global partnerships. “The audience is almost all from Gen Z, which is very unreachable nowadays,” she says, “and Sziget is very international.”

Yet Sziget has managed to achieve this without overwhelming its audience with branding. “Sometimes we’re the audience to dance with them on the stage at the end, a practice somewhat less advisable in the Cirque du Sziget area, where the world’s most renowned contemporary circus troupes – Australia’s Circa, Czechia’s Cirk la Putyka, Canada’s Cirque Alfonse – spin by their hair from poles and recreate the Ukrainian refugee crisis in acrobatic dance, amongst other jaw-dropping spectacles. With four international shows collaborating to utilise the same set-up in a dedicated 1,000-seat arena since 2015 – each company getting just nine hours to set up and rehearse – the rarity of Sziget’s commitment to cutting-edge circus acts has made the venue a huge draw, playing to full houses all weekend.

“The idea is to bring something to the visitors they haven’t necessarily seen before,” says venue manager Ziad Hakim. “There’s always a theme to the show, there’s always a story behind [it], whether it’s LBGTQ+, whether it’s war, we’ve had many different shows. We bring something new, we bring excitement, we bring emotions, all this through contemporary circus. We believe that by having such a varying and strong programme, that [is] making the festival unique.”

As such an international festival, with a young audience, Sziget has found itself well-primed to strike sponsorship deals with major international partners, making up around 10% of the festival’s full budget of €25million (with the rest covered by
its strong ticket sales). Mastercard, Samsung, TicketSwap, Bolt, Tanqueray, and Ibis are amongst the companies sponsoring main stages and areas, and Pinter sees further potential for global partnerships. “The audience is almost all from Gen Z, which is very unreachable nowadays,” she says, “and Sziget is very international.” Yet Sziget has managed to achieve this without overwhelming its audience with branding. “Sometimes we’re struggling with a partner in convincing them that less is more, at least with this audience. But every time you can reach the balance.”

With an island location used as a public park for the rest of the year, and with a nature reserve onsite, which their ten-year contract with the Budapest municipality requires them to protect, Sziget is limited in its possibilities for future expansion. Having recently upgraded the toilets (some now feature hidden doors to secret club areas) and added chill zones around catering areas, Benis hopes to redraw the site map for 2024 to include more service areas on the festival’s surrounding road. Kardos hopes to reintroduce the classical music stages he loved when he first arrived and introduce a venue exploring the impact and opportunities created by AI.

“The focus is to provide people with the time of their lives”

Otherwise, future plans are focused on learning from each year’s festival in terms of making the event safer and more efficient in maintaining its service levels – particularly as inflation has tripled many staffing costs in the past few years, ticket prices can’t increase substantially, and the 530,000-capacity can’t be stretched further.

From Benis’s specially created control room overseeing every aspect of the festival – having already honed the three-week set-up, ten-day operational period, and two-and-a-half-week takedown – it’s about fine-tuning issues such as reducing dust levels on the island; improving infrastructure and hygiene; and encouraging more environmentally friendly stage productions. “It’s really interesting to see our audience,” he says, “they’re not the ten-year-before generation who wanted to see more confetti, more lasers, more whatever. I think that’s gonna be the trend for the future – how to reduce that and be environmentally conscious.”

For Kádár, however, the future of Sziget is the same as it ever was. “After a quite hard period during Covid, it’s the start of a new beginning,” he says. “The focus is to provide people with the time of their lives.”

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