Good Tariq
A poet and writer - Austria
In 2002, when I was decided in Vienna 18 years ago, I received a literary invitation to attend a hair festival called the Struga International Hair Festival.
I will present here some of the features of this festival and two others, the most outstanding, without resorting to comparisons between us in the Arab world and without drawing a compendium of experience; only the story can reflect and think, and perhaps change if we wish.
I knew that Struga was a city located in northern Macedonia, that it had one of the oldest world poetry festivals, and that the original name of the festival was the Orchestra, founded in Struga in 1961, with the participation of only Macedonian poets, would be extended to poets from all over the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and by 1966 the event would turn into an international cultural festival.
The International Golden Crystal Award was established the same year, and Robert Rosestensky was the first to win it. In 2003, in close cooperation with UNESCO, the Festival created another international award called the Struga Bridges, for the best poetry book of a young author.
The festival hosted approximately 4,000 poets, translators, writers and literary critics from about 95 countries around the world.
The festival has also been honoured by some of the world ' s leading literary figures, including many Nobel Prize laureates, such as Joseph Brodsky, Pablo Nyroda, Shimos Heni, Leopold Sedar Singhor, Weston Huo Oden, Alan Jenspeerj and Thomas Transtromer, who have been with him in a close copy of the festival in Macedonia.
I said I'll try and answer the invitation and see how these poetry festivals are, to also know that this international literary festival stays annually, lasts six days and is one of the oldest or largest festivals in the world if not the oldest.
I arrived at Macedonian airport, and some poets arrived before me, and I had to wait for some of the other poets and poets coming from different countries to pick us up with a little bus with about ten poets heading towards an old hotel on the Dren River, to be greeted by the director of the festival, then by the holy poets of Gomel Gosel, who are familiar with the French, and by the very youngest of poets.
This was my first festival outside Austria to celebrate poetry above fantasy.
On opening day, the main bridge in the city is shut down, so it's got a big fun wood on which the poets stand to read in the evening, and the hair translation reads by representatives and professional representatives in the delivery. People go out hundreds to the river banks to celebrate this beautiful week, fill the lake with coloured boats, and the television goes on the air, and the flags of the participating countries entertain.
In the following days, readings are multiplied in many places and the special ceremonial weather of the poet is created by the guest of honour to grow by himself a tree block to grow in the poetry park in his name. There is a tree in the name of Adonis and another in the name of Mahmoud Darwish.
One of the parties that happened to me in my first visit in 2002, was the discovery of a great science for the Sudan on the edge of the Drin River, asking from the organized poet Bujumel Goselle if the city had a political conference in which the Sudan participated, because I saw a great flag for the Sudan on the bank.
From their annual tradition of this festival, they also publish seven colored doughnuts translated into Macedonian; a poet book from every continent of the seven continents, and I was lucky in 2005 that I had a Dwan carrying the title "Arger Stone of Heaven" from the translation of the great poet "Gosel."
The President of the Republic hosted the seven poets and gave us a celebratory drink to celebrate our celebration in a nice, gentle, unfavourable chat and exaggerations.
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Last October 2024, for the second time, I was invited to Costa Rica ' s International Hair Festival, the first invitation in 2014.
I remember one of the most beautiful students in my first invitation ten years ago, that I was received at San José Airport by the director of the festival himself, Norberto Salina, who asked him before travelling to the airport, who wrote to me, "Who would come to you, send a picture of your book to come up."
Funny, too, I didn't realize that the one who lifted the dough at the airport was the director of the festival himself, and I didn't know his picture.
The opening usually begins in the great theatre and in the following days to the university, and then is distributed in small groups to several regions, such as the programme, to visit schools in a large number of governorates in most parts of the country.
In 2014, I was lucky to visit a great high forest area called Monteverde. I was with a lady artist and an English-speaking escort with a professional photographer, and I visited three schools a day, and I met two evenings with the big book in the area, and a literary and artistic woman volunteered to stay there for three days in a separate beautiful house in the middle of forests.
Last year, 2024, the director of the Norberto Salina festival ran competitions in all State schools before the festival, selecting more than 70 poets and poets under the age of 18 and spreading to them large poetry physiology with their images and logo.
The programme includes a three-day visit to the largest areas of Costa Rica in the Great Tortucero region of the Caribbean Sea, at the constant invitation of the producer, to young poets and poets and young people who are winners of the Ancientology with their mothers. Days go through readings, debates, trips and the most beautiful landscape ever.
Also, one of the most beautiful things I saw in my first invitation to Costa Rica ' s World Hair Festival in 2014 is the distribution of book slogans in large posters to the city ' s public bus stations with paintings for artists, and who is waiting for the bus will read some of the slogans to one of us in his name, which is at the same time a smart announcement about the festival in the country.
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He's one of the most sweaty and big world festivals, headed by the great poet Fernando Rendon and the coordination of Luis Eduardo Rendon.
In the city of Medeen, Colombia, a living example of the triumph of hair and the tampering of a society that has lived decades of violence and crime until today, 35 years after the founding of the International Hair Festival, the same city has acquired another spirit and its stereotyping has changed in mind.
The international poetry festival in Medeen, the second largest city in Colombia after the capital, Bujuta, was founded in 1991 in that city, which was known for long years of violence and the high crime rate, and the world ' s most dangerous drug cartels were found in 1976 by Pablo Escobar, known as the late-town cartels and politicians.
The death of Pablo Escobar in 1993 was the end of the Medine cartel, which has had side effects for years of displacement, asylum and instability, so the Meddhi Hair Festival has come with an alternative idea of this disturbance, chaos and violence; those features that have abused the reputation of the city for a long time, the founding poet Fernando Reyndon of this festival, which has become one of the most important clowns.
The festival was awarded the " Right to Live " award 15 years after its founding, which is designed to honour and support those who offer practical and perfect solutions to the most pressing challenges facing us today, asserting that through art, poetry and freedom of expression, society can change positively, remove a lot of fear and violence deeply rooted in society, and gradually transform the name of the Mountains, as beautiful as the city of eternity.
At the thirty-third festival, two subsequent festivals came across Zoom during the period of the Korona, and for the second time at an official invitation, 90 poets and poets from 54 States participated.
In these festivals, the world's dye is already applicable to it and the mass presence is already very imaginative, and in addition to reading there on great tracks, poets are distributed across the country to read also in the poetry of the areas they reach.
The Medine poetry festival in Colombia lasts for a week, to which the public comes in thousands to listen to poets in the security park, a place where the opening starts and the closing ends.
The Colombian public loves poetry, nurtured, tasted and interacted with him and with all the voices and languages coming from all over the Earth, sitting for long hours listening and then waiting for poets to sign on the bleak annual physiology printed on some 340 pages of colored stereotyping paper, processed by the festival with self-word and poems in Spanish and English.
There is no privacy for the hair of a State or region in this festival, the hair there is the voice of all the world, but, on the contrary, the hair here solves any boundary, geographical or ethnic differences.
(North Austria, 2025-03-27)
