Stephen Wordsworth

EXIT 09

On 9 July I went back to Novi Sad for the opening of the EXIT Festival.  We gathered on the terrace of the Petrovaradin Fortress, enjoying the fantastic view across the Danube to Novi Sad, as the Mayor, Igor Pavličić, and EXIT general manager, Bojan Bošković, both made short speeches of welcome.  Then we walked around the venue together, sampling the range of different musical styles of offer.  The fortress is in many ways a fantastic venue, with thick walls providing good sound insulation, so the different stages can be quite close together and work at the same time, without creating musical confusion.  The crowds were peaceful, with lots of young people clearly set on having the first of several great musical nights.  We visited the main stage for a while, and watched a British rapper, Roots Manuva, and his band.  To be honest it's not what I would normally listen to, but he got a great reception from the crowd.  Meanwhile our Embassy consular team had set up their stand at the Festival camp site, and were starting to provide a range of assistance to the roughly 4,500 Brits who were camping there - providing information, and helping resolve various problems including some suspected cases of swine flu and other medical issues.

Then in the early hours of 11 July we got the tragic news that a young British visitor to the Festival had been killed in an accidental fall.  The consular team in London were in touch with the family, and our team at the camp site worked with the local authorities and with the friends of the young man to establish what had happened and how.  Naturally the friends decided not to stay at the Festival, and our consular team and the organisers worked hard to help them return to the UK that afternoon.  For the young man's friends, it was a very distressing end to something that had started so well, and it left our team deeply saddened too; but they did their jobs professionally and saw the group to the airport and onto their planes. 

The rest of the Festival passed without serious incident, and most Festival goers seem to have had a great time.  The Festival itself ended early on Monday 13 July, but the camp site stayed open until Wednesday 15 July, allowing people to disperse slowly.  As always, a small number of people were detained for possession of drugs, having ignored all the advice that we and others had been giving out.  They ended up in court, and were fined.  And for the past few days we have been processing cases of missing passports, in some cases re-uniting people who thought they had lost them with their passports that had been found and turned in by others, in other cases issuing emergency passports to get people back to the UK. 

So that's it for another year.  But for many of us the abiding memory of this EXIT will be of a young man's tragic death.  Our thoughts are with his family.

Posted at 15:36 16 July 2009 by Stephen Wordsworth  |  Comments[3]