15,000 People Attended the 8th Teriberka Arctic Festival

Russia | India

The Teriberka Arctic Festival welcomed 15,000 guests in 2023, a 150% increase over the previous year. The event featured 16 artists, 50 masterclasses and related activities, seven professionally guided festival walking tours, and two trail runs. The festival took place on 15-16 July in the village of the same name in Murmansk Oblast as part of Russia’s plan for the chairmanship of the Arctic Council in 2021-2023. Chairmanship events are operated by the Roscongress Foundation.

15,000 People Attended the 8th Teriberka Arctic Festival

“The Arctic is our present, and it is the future of the entire planet. It is a land of strong-spirited, enterprising people, a place where powerful state projects come to fruition, a land carefully preserving its culture. And that includes the unique gastronomic traditions. The festival has drawn greater attention to our Arctic regions, to the lives of the peoples of the Far North, and it has made an important contribution to the development of Arctic tourism,” Minister for the Development of the Russian Far East and Arctic Alexei Chekunkov said.

The Teriberka festival aimed to reveal the tourism potential of Russia’s smaller Arctic Zone territories, develop event tourism in the Arctic, and popularize local products and cuisine. Teriberka’s guests were treated to special musical, creative, gastronomic, sporting, and market spaces.

The festival music programme included performances by Seville (Artik & Asti), Haru, the rock band Affinage, the cover band Russian Woman, and regional artists. In turn, the festival’s gastronomic component featured a special ‘From the Arctic to the Far East‘ menu put together by a group of over 30 participants comprised of chefs and restaurateurs from Primorye and Kamchatka: Vladivostok restaurants Zuma and Millionka, the major chain of auto coffee shops Kofemashina, the Kim Sisters Project, and Kamchatka House. Murmansk Oblast was represented by the best mobile and restaurant Arctic culinary projects. Festival guests were introduced to Arctic dishes made of venison, elk, cod, halibut, Murmansk salmon, northern shrimp, Arctic and Far Eastern scallops and other seafood from the Barents and White Seas topped with lichen, cloudberry, cowberry, and blueberry from the Kola Peninsula, with taiga lemongrass from the Primorsky Region, traditional dishes from the coastal regions, and drinks with the ‘taste of the Arctic’. In total, 27,000 servings of food and 16,000 drinks were served to visitors.

The development of tourism in the Far North was discussed as part of the festival business programme Dialogues discussion platform. Participants included representatives of the Ministry for the Development of the Russian Far East and Arctic and other federal authorities and related organizations, agencies, and businesses who focused especially on the formation of national and interregional Arctic routes, reviewed best practices in the creation of business support measures and ways to develop infrastructure and logistics in the Arctic, and touched on issues of positioning among the Arctic’s constituent entities.

Event participants were also given the opportunity to send a souvenir postcard from Teriberka, apply for a polar explorer passport, play a special Arctic board game, and take part in trail runs. There were free masterclasses dedicated to drawing and to creating decorative souvenirs for the home and souvenirs: paintings, badges, and magnets. Representatives from nature reserves and the Directorate of Specially Protected Natural Areas held masterclasses for visitors, and walking tours of the Teriberka area were organised for guests and led by graduates of the School of Nature Tourism Guides.

In addition, the Children of the Arctic cultural and educational portal teamed up with the 33+1 art community to present a major land-art project aimed at drawing attention to the preservation of the culture of the indigenous peoples of the North and the Arctic environment with a 350 square metre reindeer mural created near Teriberka on the banks of Zavalishina Bay.

In recent years, the Teriberka Arctic Festival has grown to become the most celebrated event in Russia’s Arctic zone. The festival has been recognized by the Russian Event Awards, and in 2023 it was included in the TOP 50 of the National Calendar of Events for the second time in a row and among the best fairs of the 2023 Russian Trade contest organized by the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation. The 2023 festival was organized by the Ministry for the Development of the Russian Far East and Arctic, the Tourism Committee of the Murmansk Region with the assistance of the Kola District Administration, Murmankongress, the Tourist Information Centre of the Murmansk Region, and the Gastronomic Map of Russia Federal Project.