CULTURALITY at the 54th Beltinci International Folklore Festival
Subtitle
Culturality returned to Beltinci, Slovenia, this July for the folklore festival “54th Beltinci International Folklore Festival”, which brought performers, craftspeople, cultural associations, and visitors together for four days of folklore, music, local food, and community activities. By involving all eight local communities in the Municipality of Beltinci, the festival demonstrated how living cultural heritage can contribute to attracting visitors to rural areas beyond the main tourist routes.
This event is closely connected to Culturality’s focus on cultural heritage as a resource for creative tourism and sustainability in remote rural areas. The programme highlighted the importance of transmitting skills and knowledge. Traditions such as mask-making depend on craftspeople who know how to work with materials such as wood, leather, and textiles, as well as on knowledge of how particular characters should look, move, and perform. These skills are maintained through practice and their transmission within communities. The festival also included an exhibition of textile handicrafts by local craftswoman Ana Crnkovič. Her work presented another form of knowledge grounded in materials, manual skill, and long-term practice, showing how craft knowledge remains embedded in local cultural life.
A particularly relevant part of the festival was the crafts and community fair, featuring around twenty-five exhibitors and participation from all eight local communities in the Municipality of Beltinci. The fair brought together cultural associations, craftspeople, food producers, and tourism providers. It showed that local heritage is not a single, clearly bounded tradition, but a network of skills and practices that includes cooking, making, performing, hosting visitors, and organising communal work. In this sense, the fair also demonstrated how local heritage can become part of a broader visitor experience in a rural area.
Woodwork demonstrations at the crafts fair.
Textile handicrafts by Ana Crnkovič exhibited as part of the Festival.
Visitors at a traditional food stall.
As part of the Culturality project activities, CULTURALITY researcher and ZRC SAZU project team member Luka Kropivnik digitised the handwritten chronicle of the Beltinci Cultural and Artistic Association. Begun by local archivist Milica Šadl in 1969, the chronicle documents the development of the association, the festival, and cultural life in the municipality over several decades. Its photographs, invitations, newspaper clippings, handwritten notes, and records of voluntary work preserve forms of local cultural memory that are rarely documented elsewhere. A digital copy is now preserved in the Archive of the Institute of Slovenian Ethnology ZRC SAZU.
Photography: Photo Boko.
