Budapest Spring Festival to be held online

This year’s Budapest Spring Festival is being held online with free programming between April 9 and 18 by the Budapest Municipality and Budapest Brand Zrt without government support, a municipal official said on Tuesday.

The event which marks its 41st anniversary this year until now has been funded by the metropolitan council and the state, the deputy mayor responsible for culture, Gy. Erzsébet Németh, told an online briefing.

She noted that the 2020 festival was dropped due to the coronavirus epidemic, and this year the festival would no longer enjoy government support for the first time. Budapest, she added, was doing everything it could to organise the festival this year after the government notified the council of its decision a few weeks ago to withdraw funding.

Gy. Erzsébet Németh said that no government had ever dared not to support “Budapest’s largest cultural event”.

This year’s festival will be streamed online free of charge, with the aim of bringing culture “closer to the people”,

the head of Brand Zrt, Csaba Faix, said.

The online festival will feature a retrospective programme from the past decades mixed with new events, he said, adding that the exact programme will be published in the next few weeks.

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Source: MTI