THE LARGEST music festival to ever hit the island is expected to take over the tranquil area of the Karpas peninsular next summer, according to a Turkish Cypriot press report.
The weekly English-language paper Cyprus Today has reported that festival organisers plan to attract between 50,000 and 80,000 people to the ‘Golden Beach’ in the occupied north next September for a three-day music festival.
The area is known for its natural beauty and long lines of sand dunes stretching over 3km leading up to Apostolos Andreas monastery.
Organisers of the planned event, titled the Silk Route Festival, say that veteran music agent and manager Peter Jenner and Norwegian lawyer Stein Fossner will team up to bring thousands of festival goers from Scandinavia, the UK and Eastern Europe to the idyllic spot also popular with turtles looking for somewhere to hatch.
According to the paper, Jenner is the man who discovered Pink Floyd and organised the historic Hyde Park free concerts in the late 1960s.
Sophia Kristensson, a Swedish national working for the company Silk Route Entertainments in the north was quoted saying: “We are really excited, and anticipate 60 per cent of the audience will be from Cyprus and the surrounding region. The remaining 40 per cent will come from Europe.”
The festival is set to start on September 27, 2013, with ticket prices already available, ranging from £85 to £999 sterling.
The stretch of sand between the Big Sand Beach Restaurant and Burhan’s Golden Beach has been earmarked for the festival.
No infrastructure is to be set up on the beach itself, but four stages on wooden decking – Main, Urban, Beach and Dance – are planned, along with bars and DJs on the narrow road leading up to the site.
Organisers have yet to announce the festival line-up, though they hope to feature top international musicians “to appeal to several generations” and a mixture of Western and Eastern pop music in the spirit of the Silk Route, a trade route which linked the East and the West.
The issue of internationally renowned musicians performing in the north has often become a source of friction between the two communities with ‘electronic wars’ waged on online social networking sites denouncing one side or the other.
The Cyprus foreign ministry is known to intervene in such circumstances by informing artists that they are gaining profit from an illegal entity, which will likely exploit their presence for propaganda purposes. They also argue that the artists will most likely be performing on property that was stolen from Greek Cypriot refugees in 1974 which remains occupied to this day.
For their part, Turkish Cypriots complain that the Greek Cypriot-run government of Cyprus is imposing a cultural blockade, arguing that music should know no boundaries.
This latest event might serve to bring certain sections of the two communities closer however. Environmentalists on both side of the divide view the intended location as one of Cyprus’ last sites of natural beauty, along with the Akamas.
