About the Festival
On the threshold of May we traditionally have a green festival for you. The 13th lucky edition will be a 3 weekend series of Krakow concerts in Bunker and in our RE Club backyard. Come and join the fun!
Green Zoo Festival is an annual urban festival focused on good alternative music organised in Krakow since 2011. The festival usually takes place on weekends between mid-May and June at several traditional concert venues. While the festival has hosted more than 100 concerts by musicians from all over the world, Green ZOO’s main mission is to integrate local musicians with those coming from abroad, as well as DJs, journalists, photographers, graphic designers, promoters and other artists, and above all regular concert-goers, during the festival’s events. As a result, there is no clear division between concert performers, audiences and people from the independent media, art world and music industry. There have already been 12 editions of Green ZOO: in June 2011, May 2012, June 2013, May 2014, May 2015, May 2016, May/June 2017, May/June 2018, May/June 2019, the Online edition in July/September 2020, the Autumn edition in November 2021 and June/July 2022, which is a great success for this grassroots initiative of ours. Our biggest successes are the bands that played at the festival, including: Basia Bulat, Moonface, Lower Dens, Tarwater, Socalled, Molly Nilsson, Ben Caplan, Johny Foreigner, DVA, Circuit Des Yeux, Mikrokolektyw, Phedre, Screaming Females, Doug Tuttle, Alameda 5, Buke and Gase, Comets, MY DISCO, TOPS, Tamaryn, Cold Showers, Mozart’s Sister, White Wine, Operators, Black Lips, Xeno & Oaklander, Spencer Krug, Yamantaka // Sonic Titan, Trupa Trupa, The Underground Youth, Ecstatic Vision, Sneaky Jesus, Vacation, Makthaverskan, 1984, Chad VanGaalen and the people attending these concerts.
In addition to the music, the festival provides promotion for up-and-coming local musicians, organises workshops on independent music, and is committed to developing volunteer programmes.
The first edition of Green Zoo Festival was a one-day event that took place on 25 June 2011 in Krakow, at the Betel Klub and Klub Piękny Pies venues. The idea for the festival arose spontaneously in connection with a concert by Canadian songwriter Basia Bulat, organised by music promoters Front Row Heroes. The day before her performance in Krakow at the Betel Klub, Basia Bulat supported the first Arcade Fire concert in Poland at the COS Torwar hall in Warsaw. It turned out that several local Krakow bands wanted to play together with Basia. This gave the festival organisers the chance to initiate their own urban music festival, loosely modelled on showcase festivals in Canada, the US and other countries, where many bands play simultaneously in several different clubs and special venues. The festival’s name ‘Zielone ZOO’ comes from the title of the hit song ‘W zielonym zoo’ performed by Polish singer Ludmilla Jakubczak in the 1960s. This song became a permanent part of Basia Bułat’s setlist during her concerts.
