Arts Festivals Summit Budva Portrait
Step into the Arts Festivals Summit 2026 through the lens of poet and writer Simon Mundy. His perspective promises to reveal the event in a whole new light, one that is at the same time surprising and delightful.
Montenegro – Land of the Black Mountains – and so it is, except that in the spring after rain they are luxuriant green. They dominate the landscape so that they crowd and jostle, forcing their few people to cluster around the beaches of the Adriatic. These are not gentle hills. They have fierce sides to which the trees cling like necklaces. If the valleys have fields, they are cramped and stony. Roads are snakes carved into the slopes, every corner an invitation to plunge hundreds of metres to the next level down.
How did anyone ever control these geological fortresses? Perhaps all those empires, Roman, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Venetian, never did really. The territory was on the edge of everyone's map of the Balkans. It had a king who was briefly independent at the end of the 19th century and for a few years of the 20th, secluded in his small inland capital at Cetinje; and it has been its own republic for most of this one so far, but I doubt if that was ever the whole truth. It is a land novelists, wanting to set exotic adventure stories in a country with an invented name, could adopt: near enough to feel familiar, strange enough to be wild.
And yet... Montenegro is now about to join the European Union mainstream. It already uses the euro and has been churning its way through the thousands of pages of deadly dull EU regulations since 2012. It's airline now proclaims proudly that the country will be a full member from 2028. Before then, though, it will have the next six month Presidency (starting in November) of the much larger and less restrictive Council of Europe, where cultural values are set as part of our human rights.
Even for Budva, once a Venetian walled stronghold like Dubrovnik up the coast, now a thriving tourist resort with millionaires' yachts filling the harbour, the arrival of two hundred delegates to the Arts Festivals Summit must have been a mild shock to the nervous system. For the delegates themselves, many of whom would have found it hard to find Montenegro on the map a few years ago, it was a true voyage of discovery. The Vranac wine, the winding alleys of the old town, the glorious views from the cable car high above the bays that hold the towns of Kotor and Tivat, the enthusiasm of the musicians presenting their versions of the Balkan sound; these were all reminders that even the best integrated Europeans have a lot to learn.
For EFA itself the Budva summit was a new experience, not because we were in an unusual place (after all, we have been to Galway and Yerevan this decade, neither of them exactly on the Rhine) but because we were hosted not by a general arts or classical music festival, but by one devoted to theatre, that art form so vital yet so hampered by language.
Often at assemblies devoted to serious topics, professionally investigated and presented, the days are dominated by plenary sessions, workshops and side meetings. Problems are shared, inspiration is sought, useful partners are found for the nicest sorts of conspiracies. All of these happened impressively, of course, but somehow they were dwarfed by the place itself. The Adriatic beckoned, the mountains protected. Trapped between high rocks and wide sea we were lured into our own cloistered world, our worries banished, our distant troubles paused and postponed.
By Simon Mundy