From July 8 to 14, 2025, the international Slavianski Bazaar festival took place in Vitebsk, while from July 10 to 13, the Tutaka festival was held in the Boryk forest near the village of Gródek in Poland’s Podlaskie Voivodeship. Among the guests at Tutaka was former political prisoner Sergei Tikhanovsky, who held an informal meeting with festival attendees.
Viktoria Kirichenko, host of the “Beware, Provocateurs” segment on the Minsk-News agency’s YouTube channel, compared the two festivals and called the Polish one “the biggest joke of the weekend.”
“The festival, if you can even call it that, was clearly organized as a swipe at the Slavianski Bazaar. And this gathering of runaways fits perfectly with the meme ‘bootleg version vs. the real deal.’ The pathetic bootleg of a festival looks like this: about a hundred people gathered to watch Tikhanovsky fry cutlets. We’re not downplaying the turnout — by modest estimates, there weren’t even a hundred people there,” she said on air July 14.
The WTF team verified that Kirichenko’s claims about the festival in Poland being a knockoff and its low turnout don’t hold up. We reviewed drone footage — the camera captured a significantly larger crowd than “about a hundred.” Organizers reported several thousand attendees over the four-day event.
The Tutaka festival is the successor to Basowiszcza, a regional festival of alternative and rock music. The first edition was held in July 1990 and continued annually in the same place each July until 2019. It was consistently organized by the Belarusian Student Association, founded by young people from the Białystok region. The Tutaka festival launched at the same location and time of the year two years later, in 2021.
The first edition of Slavianski Bazaar took place in July 1992. It replaced the Polish Song Festival in Vitebsk, which began in 1988.
Planned as an international showcase from the start, it has been organized with full state backing.
