Burgas Sand Sculpture Festival closes summer season
The active tourist season along the Bulgarian Black Sea coast is over, yet tourist attractions are still being staged. The weather has remained sunny and hot, and there are a great many cultural events such as concerts, exhibitions, and theatre productions going on at the same time in various places.
For the fourth time this year the coastal city of Burgas hosted the Festival of Sand Sculpture. Here is more from Mihail Kutsev, director of the municipal company in charge of staging summer theatre, festivals and concerts.
“The festival opens traditionally on July 1, and if it does not rain, the sculptures, can endure for as long as the beginning of October. We don’t stage ostentatious closing ceremonies. People do not like the sight of the sculptures being destroyed, and usually after September 15, which is the first day of the new school year, we let the students watch them for free, but then the sculptures are being destroyed and the sand is collected for the sculptures that will be built next year. We are happy that the festival is gaining in popularity. The first year we had some 15 000-20000 visitors, but their number has grown to reach nearly 100 000 this year. We have artists coming from all over the world to create sand sculptures. Since the festival’s second edition we began inviting Bulgarian sculptors, as well. They have now gathered enough experience and excel at similar festivals abroad.”
The inaugural edition of the Festival of Sand Sculptures in Burgas was held in 2008. It included artists from Indonesia, the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland, Russia, and Ukraine. The municipal sea garden was full of castles, towers, sea creatures, mermaids, pirates and other fairy tale characters. On the second year in the middle of the ‘sand city’ the “Tree of Fairy Tales” emerged and towered to the height of 8.5 m above the ground. There were also sand sculptures of Romeo and Juliet, Jabba the Hutt from “Star Wars”, Shrek, and the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger from the “Ice Age” animation feature. In 2010 the subject of the festival was “Circus”, and they all sculpted sand circus tops, clowns, magicians, animal trainers and acrobats. This year’s subject theme was “Cinema”. The visitors are still able to see the sand sculptures of characters from “Star Wars”, “Pirates of the Caribbean”, “Batman”, “Lord of the Rings”, “The Mask of Zoro”, the Harry Potter movies, etc. The park is particularly spectacular to visit in the evenings, when the sand castles lit by various colours of light look as if they are alive. To the sound of the crickets and the breaking of the waves, people become actors in a magical cinematic show in red, green, yellow and orange… Or, to put it in the words of Mihail Kutsev, one becomes a character in a film shot under the stars of the clear summer skies…
Text and photo: bnr.bg
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