Ukraine's beach party utopia
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Every summer, the beaches of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula are taken over by KaZantip - billed as the “biggest, longest, craziest and most unusual music event in the world”. Already notorious among Russian-speaking clubbers, the dance party is now drawing an increasingly international crowd.
The KaZantip beach party - which takes place at Popovka in east Crimea - is an annual five-week dance and rave festival where partygoers really can get away from it all.
It describes itself as a republic, a kind of independent country dedicated to thrill-seeking and fun. It’s got its own constitution, its own foreign minister, and entry is via a single or multiple entry “viZa” that you purchase like a ticket.
This gives you access to a beach-front area where you can dance and party the summer away 24 hours a day on 10 different dance floors and in fifteen bars and lounges. Around 300 DJs played this year, among them the UK's Carl Cox who headlined on the closing night.
The festival is now in its 18th year and has long been one of the Russian-speaking world's best kept secrets, attracting around tens of thousands of partygoers from the former Soviet Union every summer.
But it seems the news is finally leaking out. This year saw a sharp rise in the number of clubbers from France, Britain, Italy, France and Germany, as other Europeans begin to catch on to KaZantip’s strange blend of retro-clubbing and Slavic hedonism.
