Lithuania On The Festival Map

The Baltic region has no history of staging festivals and Latvia’s Positivus – which this year did 30,000 per day – is the only one with any claims to international status. Lithuania also has Live Music Beach at Karkle, a village between Klaipeda and Palanga and close to the Palanga highway.

Although the Karkle fest has done well to grow to 10,000-strong crowds in five years, the lineup of largely local acts means it hasn’t attracted much international attention.

For Granatos, Klimasauskas has clung on to whatever festival heritage Lithuania has by staging his event at Rumšiškes, about 15 miles east of Kaunas and the site of the country’s largest outdoor ethnographic museum.

The museum is a very popular place where ethnographic festivals are celebrated. Folk song and dance concerts are still held there. 15,000 per day showed at Granatos Aug. 1-3 to see a bill that included Bastille, John Newman, Dub FX, and Latvian favourites Instrumenti.

That makes it half the size of Positivus but still double the size that Positivus was at two years of age.

Granatos Live’s claims to being an international festival are also arguably diluted by the fact that 90 percent of the talent on show was homegrown Lithuanian. The other international acts brought in from outside Lithuania included Flirtini (Poland), Jarreau Vandal (The Nethrlands, and Raumskaya (Russia).