Getting Arty In Romania

While a number of outdoor fests in the old Eastern Bloc compete to attract visitors from Western Europe, Romania’s ARTmania Festival says it’s also attracting more foreign visitors.

The weeklong urban fest in Sibiu, a Transylvanian city about 220 miles northwest of Bucharest, says this year the number of visitors from outside of Romania rose from 10 percent to 17 percent. Most of them came from Germany, Spain, Italy and Bulgaria.

Since starting in 2006, ARTmania (Aug. 6-12) has been a seven-day multicultural extravaganza that includes visual art exhibitions in the cultural spaces of Sibiu, museum exhibitions, film screenings, classical music performances, lectures, workshops and parties in club cellars.

What really sells the most tickets is the two-day rock-focused music festival that happens over the weekend, which this year featured Die Toten Hosen, My Dying Bride, and Edguy.

It’s held in one of the main squares in Sibiu, which was designated a European Capital of Culture for the year 2007 and was once ranked by Forbes as “Europe’s eighth most idyllic place to live.”

Anyone wanting to attend one of the other days of the music festival can buy a day ticket for 100 lei ($27). Fans wanting to attend both music days would be better off paying 150 lei ($41) for a full seven-day pass.

“It’s getting better slowly but surely,” ARTmania promotions chief Claudiu Stanciu told Pollstar, reporting that this year’s overall crowd figures for the weekend were up about 1,000 per day on 2011.

This year ARTmania sold 3,000 seven-day passes, plus 7,000 day passes for Friday and 6,000 for Saturday.
Other acts helping to provide the music included Deathstars, Epica, Delain, Poets Of The Fall, Trail of Tears, and Alternosfera.