sep 13, 2001

Sola Luna Festival Aug 31-Sep 2, 2001

photos & text by Sam .

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Sola Luna 2001 - A milestone in greek festival history

In the last years it was quite about open air trance parties in Greece. The reason is the strict and aggressive anti party / anti drug policy of Greece. Lot's of parties have been cancelled, smashed, organisers jailed etc.. This made party organisers afraid of organising bigger open air parties. The Sola Luna crew finally tried a quite organised and connected approach by cooperating with a lot of officials and a major festival company. And it worked out: No police problems on the festival and a general positive outcome both to festival people and locals!

Sola Luna happened on the beautiful island Samothraki. Samothraki is a small island in the north eastern agean see close to Turkey. It is of volcanic origin and is actually the second highest Greek island after Crete. It's a very beautiful island and due to it's remote location and the lack of sand beaches still quite ignored by tourists.

The party happened on a camping place. The camping area had enough trees for shadow which was important since Greece is hot in summertime. The main dancefloor was set on a field at the beach, a mountain panorama in the back, the sea in front. You could actually swim while listening to the music or even dive! The second floor was a five minutes walk under some trees. Actually the better location since you had shadow while dancing. The best location I've seen in my trance party live!

Organisation was remarkably good for a first party in this scale for the organisers. Security was friendly, toilets were beeing cleaned quite often, trash collected and removed directly after the main floor finished, etc.. Of course there were a few things that could have been better like the somehow displaced chairs in the chill-out but these can be forgiven in my opinion.

The music on the main floor was good although it included a lot of the typical artists that you experience on international events. Those were in general not that suprising but surely this music was what lot's of people wanted. Interestingly there were no israeli artists (if I remember right) and no germans on the main floor! I don't want to name highlights here because I was not there all the time. What could be improved was the sequence of the artists! On the second floor there was a quite diverse program ranging from house via dub via technorock to ambient. It was a good idea but also here the sequence was not that good and the atmosphere could have been improved. Only rarely more than 100 people at a time were in the second area.

The vibe was amazing. The people were very friendly and happy. You constantly heard screaming from the main floor, that floor often had a few thousand people dancing. The Greeks were nice as well and counted probably 50% of the visitors. All together I estimate the size of the party between 6000-8000 people.

So if you thought about coming before and decided to stay at home, I'm sorry for you: This was for sure a mistake. But maybe you can make it next year. But then there's another problem: This party probably motivated a dozens of Greeks to do an open air party next year. So it will be up to you to choose the right one!