Location for Romania’s biggest electronic music festival is uncertain

Untold, Romania’s biggest electronic music festival, may be forced to change its location in 2017 if its organizers don't reach an agreement with the local authorities for holding the event on the Cluj Arena stadium. Untold will take place in early August and the organizers have already started selling passes. The president of Cluj County Council, Alin Tise, said that the possible rental of the stadium for the 2017 edition of Untold would be taken into consideration only after the event’s organizers will repair all the damages the 2016 edition of the festival caused to the stadium, as required in the contract. “I will discuss a possible lease of the Cluj Arena stadium for Untold 2017, as well as the value of the rent, only after the remaining repairs are completed, which I also said in a written notification sent to Untold organizers,” Alin Tise said, according to a statement from Cluj County Council. Both the 2015 and 2016 editions of Untold took place on the Cluj Arena stadium in Cluj-Napoca. After this year’s edition, a special commission made in August an inventory of all damages caused to the stadium’s grass, tracks, stands, and other facilities and drafted a report. The organizers of Untold were supposed to pay for the damages, reads the statement. Cluj County Council, which manages Cluj Arena, says that the damages haven’t been fully remedied so far. In return, Adrian Chereji, marketing & communications director Untold, said: "We want to ensure the festival's fans and the public authorities that, through all the actions and measures taken, from meeting all national and international standards for safety to all the campaigns of social responsability, we've been, in our opinion, the most responsible event in Romania." He also said that the Untold organizers have offered guarantees that exceed the ones required to other events' organizers, including an insurance of EUR 10 million, therefore they assume that this is just "a lack of information of the Cluj County Council," especially as they've been in permanent contact in Cluj Arena's management, with which they agreed the calendar for the work that hasn't been done so far due to objective reasons, such as the low temperatures. Untold won the Best Major Festival Title at the 2015 European Festival Awards. This year’s edition of the event gathered more than 300,000 on the Cluj Arena stadium, and 10% of them were foreigners. The first subscriptions for the 2017 edition of the festival were put up for sale on November 25, and were sold in less than three minutes. Irina Popescu, irina.popescu@romania-insider.com