BALTICA 2025
From June 26 to 29, Latvia will host the 13th International Baltica Folklore Festival, which this year celebrates the diversity of the Latvian and Liv languages under the theme "Language". Folklore groups, ethnographic ensembles, musicians, craftsmen and other promoters of intangible cultural heritage from all regions of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia will gather in Riga, Sigulda and Daugavpils for concerts, workshops, dances and other events. There will also be folklore and traditional music groups from Peru and Ukraine, as well as representatives of the Ukrainian diaspora.
This year, Baltica invites you to look at language in its broadest sense - to explore the language, patterns, rhythms, sounds and character of your own local area in words, music, song, dance, stories, crafts and the manner of playing music to remember the forgotten and recover the lost, to highlight the peculiar and strengthen the fragile. Two hundred and fifty-five folklore groups and folk music bands from all over Latvia participated in the preliminary review performances, telling stories about the language that once was or still is spoken in a certain place, about the way birds, church bells and sea waves speak, about the stories, surnames, peculiar names and other paths the local language has taken. The programs and the richness of the language will be experienced on each day of the festival.
On June 26 and 27, the International Baltica Folklore Festival will take to the streets of Riga, filling the Old Town with songs, music, dances, stories and the joy of meeting people. On June 28, the festival will resound in the Sigulda area, closing the day on Turaida’s Daina Hill to mark its 40th anniversary. On June 29, Baltica will move to Daugavpils, where the festival's languages and sounds will fill the streets, churches and parks.
Latvia's first Baltica Festival took place in 1988 and became the largest folklore festival ever held in the country, bringing with it the wind of change, the public return of the red-white-red flag of the Republic of Latvia and a wider understanding of our living traditional culture. Over the years, the festival has changed, but it has remained the largest gathering of traditional culture, a long-awaited event for the participants themselves, and an opportunity for everyone to live with, participate in, and see what is happening today in the preservation, inheritance, and development of traditional culture. With the festival, a new generation has grown up that continues to celebrate song, dance, music, crafts and other values of intangible cultural heritage.