A brief history of Sziget Festival
In partnership with Sziget Festival
Sziget, Hungary’s foremost music festival, will turn 30 years old this summer. Previously lauded by NME as “Europe’s answer to Glastonbury”, the annual Budapest event launched back in 1993 with an initial emphasis on promoting local music and culture. But even in its infancy, the festival was clearly going places – the first-ever Sziget drew over 40,000 punters, while 100,000 more people turned up the following year. In the three decades since then it’s only gone from strength to strength, attracting some of the biggest artists in the world to its stages and almost 10 million visitors through its gates, helping further establish Sziget as one of the biggest and best festivals in Europe.
Sziget 2023 looks set to continue this upward trajectory, with artists from 60 countries set to perform across six days at this year’s festival from August 10-15. With the likes of Billie Eilish, Lorde and Florence + The Machine all set to add to the festival’s rich history of previous headliners – Prince, Radiohead and David Bowie have all topped the Sziget bill in the past – the Budapest bash looks set for another bumper edition this summer.
To celebrate Sziget 2023 and the festival’s 30th anniversary, let’s take a brief look back at Sziget’s storied history.
Let’s go back to the Szi-ginning
Sziget launched 30 years ago as ‘Diáksziget’ (translated as Student Island Festival) on Óbuda, a 76-hectare island in the Danube River that still hosts the festival today. Inspired by the free and hopeful spirit in the country that was generated by Hungary becoming a republic in 1989, the first festival, as Sziget co-founder Károly Gerendai recalled in a 2017 interview, was “born from the concept of all our friends hanging out together and looking for a place where we could create a festival, enjoy good music and feel good during the summer holidays”.
Just a few friends turned up to that inaugural edition: over 43,000 attendees were treated to an impressively packed programme of live music, theatre and cinema. Sziget hasn’t looked back since.
‘EuroWoodstock’, Bowie and Prince
Following its successful debut in 1993, Gerendai and his fellow festival co-founder Péter Müller Sziami went about organising the next Sziget, which drew in 100,000 more festivalgoers 12 months later. The 1994 festival was particularly notable as it served as a 25th anniversary tribute to Woodstock, arguably music’s most iconic and influential live event which took place in upstate New York in 1969. Sziget booked a number of the artists who played at the original Woodstock, including Blood, Sweat & Tears and Ten Years After, for what was dubbed ‘EuroWoodstock’, and the festival received global media coverage, including MTV, for the first time.
Despite its early success Sziget operated at a loss in those first years, requiring the need for outside sponsorship. The festival was renamed Pepsi Sziget for a period in the late-90s, which, while it was a decision that didn’t please everyone, helped Sziget stay on its feet and continue to grow. Take its 1997 edition, for example: over 250,000 punters from all corners of the world filed through Sziget’s gates to witness David Bowie’s hugely memorable headline set that year.
How do you top a Bowie headline show, we hear you ask? Well, how about the time that Prince was booked in 2011 to deliver one of Sziget’s greatest ever headline performances? Over the course of 28 songs – including two encores – the late music legend wowed Sziget like never before, playing such hits as ‘1999’, ‘Purple Rain’ and ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ in a set that was positively jam-packed with era-defining party-starting bangers.
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The festival has always been passionate about championing progressive activism
Ever since its inception, Sziget has proudly supported a whole range of important causes. Take their longstanding alliance with the LGBTQIA+ community, epitomised by the launch of the Magic Mirror Stage in 2001. The area was designed, as Sziget explains to NME, for the community “to be able to introduce themselves and present their culture, so that people who have never met members of this circle in their lives could get to know them”.
Sziget bravely stood up to a number of dissenting outside voices, including some prominent Hungarian politicians, after establishing the Magic Mirror Stage on its festival map, but the area’s ultimate longevity in the face of such discrimination speaks volumes. The festival adds: “We still believe today that we can get over prejudices if we get to know each other and our differences, in order to accept each other and be tolerant.”
In 2002 Sziget launched the hugely popular Roma Tent, which served to uplift and celebrate the music and culture of Roma people, while in 2009 the festival hosted a special Music Against Racism-curated programme in a bid to promote their unwavering belief in equality. Sziget partnered with the founders of the Rock Against Racism and Love Music Hate Racism movements to make this important initiative happen, with the resulting campaign, Sziget says, “gaining momentum in Hungary, where the fight against blind hatred and inequality began”.
Civil Sziget, meanwhile, has played host to discussions, performances and activism by a number of important NGOs, all of whom stress the importance of tolerance and acceptance. And then there’s Sziget’s ‘Tent Without Borders’ program, which started in 2016 to raise awareness for the past and present plights of refugees. “Today’s global events unfortunately prove that the theme of the venue is just as timely as it was nine years ago,” Sziget say. “Apart from providing the chance for visitors to learn more about migration in general, with the contribution of UNHCR and the French National Immigration History Museum, the venue also serves the purpose of pointing out how colourful, diverse and multifaceted the world is, and how many different readings the same story can have.
“Tent Without Borders in 2023 will merge into our new venue, ‘Think For Tomorrow’, where migration-themed workshops and roundtable events will discuss the topic alongside other important issues like climate change, mental health and the future of education.”
As well as showcasing a diverse array of genres, Sziget has long embraced electronic music
Sziget CEO Tamás Kádár is keen to emphasise the importance of electronic music to the festival. “Electronic music had its first dedicated venue at Sziget, called the Night Zone Party Arena, in 2000,” he tells NME. “The line-up included Seb Fontaine, Paul Van Dyk, Darren Emerson and Nick Warren. Since then, electronic music has been strongly represented at Sziget every year. As well as the Party Arena, Sziget has the iconic Colosseum with its spectacular and one-of-a-kind design – fans of techno in particular can find the best acts in the world here.
“But Sziget’s Main Stage has also played host to the biggest names in EDM: this year, we will welcome the world’s number one DJ, David Guetta, here.”
The Island of Freedom
As Sziget’s ‘Love Revolution’ manifesto states, the festival was originally founded “to give young people in Hungary the opportunity to meet and feel the power of a free and open community after the fall of the Iron Curtain”. The successful establishment of Sziget in those early years was viewed by many as a “model republic” for Hungary to follow, where “full respect for personal freedom, acceptance of diversity, and peaceful cooperation and coexistence of different cultures and people were natural for everyone”.
Sziget’s nickname ‘The Island of Freedom’ is quite fitting, then. Drawing in people from more than 100 countries from all over the world, Sziget’s community of ‘Freedom Islanders’ are, the festival says, part of a “love generation” who are keen for the festival “to provide space and support for ideas that would make the world a better place for all of us, and highlight the most important problems facing our society”. Be it standing up for peace, taking sustainable action against global warming or continuing “the fight against racism, homophobia and xenophobia in all of its shapes and forms”, the values of The Island of Freedom are sacrosanct.
Here’s to the next 30 years of Sziget
This summer’s edition of Sziget will once again boast one of the most impressive and varied festival line-ups in Europe, with Billie Eilish, David Guetta, Florence + The Machine, Imagine Dragons, Lorde, Macklemore and Mumford & Sons all set to headline. Elsewhere on the bill, the likes of Foals, Bonobo, girl in red, Sam Fender, Arlo Parks, Jamie xx, Caroline Polachek and Diplo will all no doubt assist in helping make Sziget 2023 another festival to remember.
Elsewhere, the returning ‘Art of Freedom’ feature will bring “visual power to the diverse world of the Island of Freedom, with striking, thought-provoking and stunning artworks and space installations”, while organisers are also promising that many venues like the TicketSwap Colosseum “will be even more spectacular”.
Make sure you don’t miss out, then – Sziget 2023 looks like the place to be this August.
You can find out more information about Sziget, including ticket information, by heading here.
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Sam Moore
NME
