Community Corner
This Weekend: Balkan Bonanza in Brooklyn
New York City's largest Balkan music festival kicks up its heels at Grand Prospect Hall
Dust off your accordion and haul your zourna out of storage—the Golden Festival is coming to Brooklyn this weekend.
On Friday and Saturday night, the annual festival of Balkan music and dance will feature more than sixty groups performing over thirteen hours in the deliriously ornate .
The music will venture over a wide range of regions and styles, from Greek folk, Croatian song cycles, and polyphonic Ukrainian wedding songs, to Barbes staple Slavic Soul Party.
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And don’t sweat it if you’re a little rusty on your Balkan dance moves—Friday night’s festivities will begin with a dance workshop.
This is the festival’s first venture into Brooklyn, though it has been raging on in New York for 26 years. Last year’s festival in Inwood drew 1,800 people, and the festival’s organizers expect even more this time.
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“It’s grown every year,” said one of the festival’s organizers, Emerson Hawley. “The last couple of years, it’s been at a school in Inwood, and it wasn’t big enough. So this move will allow everybody to come who wants to.”
The festival is hosted by Hawley’s 12-piece Balkan brass band, Zlatne Uste, which formed in New York in the early 1980s. Hawley, a semi-retired biomedical engineer at SUNY Downstate, plays tuba. He said he got into Balkan music by way of recreational folk dancing when he was a student at Johns Hopkins University in the 1960s.
“I like it because it’s really gutsy,” he said. “It ain’t Lawrence Welk.”
The name of the band means “golden lips”—sort of. “It’s not quite grammatically correct,” Hawley admits. “It was a long time ago and none of use were particularly fluent in this language, but it was supposed to be Serbo-Croation.”
In addition to the dancing and music, the festival will also offer a delectable selection of Balkan and Middle Eastern treats to eat, including skordhalia, Vassilopita, and feta.
Tickets for adults are $20 for Friday and $45 for Saturday, or $60 for two nights. Profits from the festival will be donated to Balkan charities and educational groups including the East European Folklife Center.
For more information and a complete schedule, visit www.goldenfest.org.
