The Valley of Arts was held for the 35th time this year. For ten days, the villages of Kapolcs, Taliándörögd, and Vigántpetend welcomed visitors with concerts, theatre performances, literary events, and visual arts programmes. Some 140,000 people could choose from around 4,300 activities at 40 venues throughout Hungary’s largest multidisciplinary arts festival.
Our Foundation also took part for the first time. Day after day, festivalgoers could encounter the story of Otto von Habsburg at one of the busiest spots in Kapolcs, the Main Square, through our open-air exhibition, 99 Years Around the World. Seven large-format panels combined archival photographs with short texts to present selected chapters from his past: his childhood in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the years of exile and the Second World War, and his later engagement in European public life.
The focus on travel fitted naturally with the holiday mood of summer and the constant comings and goings of the Valley. Throughout his career, the former Crown Prince was frequently on the move: his lecture tours took him to numerous European countries as well as North and South America, Asia, and Africa, while he built up an extensive international network. The display highlighted this remarkable geographical breadth, allowing those who stopped for a few minutes amid the festival bustle between one concert and the next to follow part of his route around the world.
We are pleased that this time we were able to reach audiences who had previously known relatively little about our namesake. We hope to present the exhibition elsewhere in the future; meanwhile, those who were unable to make it to Kapolcs can scroll down to view the Hungarian-language panels and virtually accompany Otto von Habsburg across almost a century and five continents.
