Folk costume festival brings colourful heritage to Kamnik
Kamnik, 6 September - The 49th Days of National Costumes and Clothing Heritage, one of the biggest folk festivals in Slovenia, will kick off in Kamnik on Friday with a film screening and opening ceremony, painting the northern town in vibrant colours of regional costumes until Sunday.
Kamnik
The traditional folk costume parade.
Photo: Tamino Petelinšek/STA
The event's highlight will be Sunday's colourful procession of folk costumes. The festival attracts more than 30,000 visitors every year.
The Guardian listed it among its 20 great traditional festivals in Europe last year, praising the closing event as a "parade of elaborate floats, carriages, brass bands and marchers in the intricate, handmade traditional folk costumes of regions throughout Slovenia and beyond".
The programme will include exhibitions on costume heritage and traditional music instruments, workshops, performances, activities for children and film screenings, showing the first Slovenian sound feature film On Our Own Land, selected for the official competition at the 1949 Cannes Film Festival, and last year's critically acclaimed film Cold War by Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski.
Kamnik will host folk groups from Belarus, Bulgaria, Austria, Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina, with all of their costumes being on full display at Sunday's parade. President Borut Pahor will attend the closing highlight, which features some 2,000 participants.
The Guardian also lavished praise on Kamnik, describing it as "a charming medieval gateway to the Alps, and the beer capital of Slovenia, with six award-winning microbreweries in a town of just 13,000".