Rock’N’Sich in Kyiv

Just like during the Euro-2012 everyone became a soccer fan for a month, this time everyone turned into a rock fan during the “Rock’N’Sich” Festival. The festival’s audience was amazingly diverse: the action on Trukhaniv Island brought together both families with children and bikers, members of sub-cultures and random beach goers. Free admission certainly facilitated such diversity.

“Rock’N’Sich” Festival is held for the fifth time in Kyiv. This festival is organized and inspired by Oleh Skrypka. The novelty of this year is the fact that this year the event became Swedish-Ukrainian. Over the weekend Vopli Vidopliasova, Pain, Clawfinger, Tiamat, TMNK, Bumboks, Tartak, and many other bands performed on the main stage “Barge.” Fans danced right in the Dnipro.

Apart from enjoying the concerts, the visitors of the festival had a chance to see nearly a hundred of Harley Davidson motorcycles, danced rock and roll, and participated in many competitions and contests. On June 8 a monument to the Swedish fans was unveiled on the island – it features digits one and two in the national colors that embrace one another – a symbol of the year of the championship. Swedish tent camp on Trukhaniv Island got in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s largest camping site of Swedish fans. It seems that the Swedish fans will come to Kyiv again – this time not to root for soccer teams but to participate in a festival of high-quality rock.

At the concert Oleh Skrypka invited everyone to join the clean-up on Monday.

The festival is also associated with somewhat unpleasant fact – it was held despite the requests of the environmentalists. At this time of the year birds are nesting and because of the loud music they leave the nests and the chicks who then die on their own. Environmentalists asked Oleh Skrypka and Oleksandr Popov to hold the festival in fall or at some other location – but nobody listened to them.