SZIGET FESTIVAL
SZIGET’ S NEXT STAGE
As the temperatures soared, Christopher Barrett examined the changes and challenges at Hungary’ s newly independent Sziget Festival alongside production manager Tibor Horváth and the trusted team at Dutch Barrier Services.
This year’ s Sziget Festival was the first since 2017 to be run independent of Superstruct ownership, with its founder Károly Gerendai back at the helm.
Located on Budapest’ s Óbudai island in the middle of the Danube River that separates Buda and Pest in the
Hungarian capital, Sziget was first staged in 1993. Gerendai led the event’ s evolution to an 85,000-capacity, six-day event, before Superstruct took a controlling 70 % stake in the event.
The return of Sziget’ s founder to what’ s become known as‘ the island of freedom’ this year led to a series of changes, perhaps the most notable being a reduction in the event’ s length to five days and its capacity trimmed back to 65,000.
While Gerendai has returned as Sziget’ s owner, CEO Tamás Kádár continues to handle day-to-day operations alongside Tibor Horváth.
While making the site less challenging when it comes to coping with logistics such as power, sewage and water provision, Horváth says the key reason for reducing the capacity this year was to enable an improved experience for attendees.
Among the other changes was a
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