2nd TRIETHNÉS FESTIVAL

The TRIETHNÉS International Music Festival was founded in 2024 with a vision to serve as a bridge of intercultural dialogue, bringing together the three countries that share the Prespa region: Greece, Albania, and North Macedonia. 

Through contemporary music and performing arts, the festival seeks to promote collaboration, understanding, and friendship, while celebrating the unique cultural heritage of each nation and the common traditions that connect them. Set in the heart of Prespa—a region rich in history, cultural memory, and ecological significance—TRIETHNÉS aspires to become a hub for cultural diplomacy, sustainability, and artistic innovation in the Balkans and beyond. 

The festival is co-produced with the Municipality of Prespa (Greece), reflecting a strong commitment to local engagement and regional development.

By recognizing shared heritage and embracing artistic experimentation, the festival creates a dynamic space where the past is honored, the present explored, and the future imagined.With a strong focus on sustainability, inclusivity, and education, TRIETHNÉS hopes to inspire global awareness of Prespa’s natural and cultural treasures. Its long-term goal is to transform the region into a global center of artistic excellence, environmental consciousness, and cultural unity, leaving a lasting legacy of creativity, connection, and harmony for generations to come.

THEME 2026: BACK TO THE BEGINNING

In the Prespa region, the idea of returning is never a simple reversal of departure. It is not a step backwards, but part of a wider cycle that continues to unfold. People leave, and people come back. Seasons turn, the lake rises and recedes, paths that once fell silent are walked again. The beginning is not fixed in the past; it exists wherever movement completes its circle.

Villages that once emptied remain present in the landscape, not as relics of absence, but as thresholds. Doors that closed may open again. Houses that stood in stillness await new voices, familiar or unfamiliar. Return does not erase what has happened in between. It carries with it the distance travelled, the knowledge gathered elsewhere, and the quiet transformation of those who come back changed.

In Prespa, return is not only physical. It is the return of sound, of language, of gesture. Songs carried across borders find their way back to the place where they first emerged, altered by time and distance. Musical traditions, like the people who sustain them, move outward and inward in continuous exchange. What begins here travels far, and what returns brings with it the memory of elsewhere.

This year’s theme, Back to the Beginning, is not an attempt to recreate an origin as it once was, but to recognise the beginning as something living. A point that can be reached again, not in repetition, but in renewal. Each return marks both an end and a new departure. Each gathering becomes part of a longer continuum that extends beyond the present moment.

Through its programme of performances and newly commissioned works, the festival reflects this cyclical movement. Contemporary creation meets traditional forms, not to preserve them unchanged, but to allow them to continue evolving. Prespa becomes once again a place of convergence: of those who remained, those who left, and those who return. Not to remain permanently, but to reconnect, to listen, and to begin again.