Beyond words and into complexity – Human stories at Slavika 20264 min read
From Balkan recipes to Central Asian photo collections, Slavika 2026 brought fragments of Slavic cultures to Turin. Lossi 36’s South-East Europe editor Riccardo Franceschetti reflects on a festival where culture, poetry and politics intertwine.
From 12 to 15 March, the city of Turin, Italy, hosted the country’s largest festival of Slavic cultures – a truly immersive experience whose remit ranged from Zagreb to Almaty. This year’s edition featured almost twenty sessions covering – among others – tales of Ukrainian resistance, Polish and Russian poetry talks, documentaries on Belarus’ hybrid warfare at the EU’s borders, book presentations by Bosnia and Herzegovina’s writer and activist Dejan Atanacković, and translation workshops in Russian, Ukrainian and Serbo-Croatian.
Slavika Festival in Turin, Italy 2026
In spite of the breadth of the festival’s programme, what struck attendees was not only the richness of the sessions or the depth of the debates. It was also a rather subtle – yet rare and precious – thing: the creation of a space of coexistence. The organizers showed a sincere desire to reconnect cultures, centre human stories and highlight the universality of suffering and poetry. This meant going beyond political polarization and easy-to-draw red lines on participation and topics – something all the more unusual and welcome in the times we live in, and in a country like Italy, which experiences the post-communist space as a very distant region in spite of its geographical proximity.
Italian newspapers have recently been filled with multiple highly politicized debates about two cases involving the participation of Russian citizens in two international gatherings. On the one hand, the admission of Russian and Belarusian athletes to this year’s Milano-Cortina Paralympic games attracted harsh criticism from Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani and European Commissioner Glenn Micallef. On the other hand, the reopening of the Russian pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale – following the withdrawal of Russian artists and curators from the event in 2022 – saw the reaction of the European Commission, who, alongside 22 European governments and the Italian Ministry of Culture, threatened to withdraw public funding for future editions of the festival.
Beyond simplistic arguments about the universality of art and sport and the need to “keep politics out” of them, these forms of criticism reflect a widely perceived unease among many Western politicians and institutions about being associated with anything Russian. To some extent, especially in the examples above, this is an understandable position. To a disillusioned eye, it is clear that both the Olympic Games and the opening a national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (which is generally curated by an individual nominated by the government and is relatively free to select the artists and themes of the exhibition) also function as tools for projecting a country’s soft power, making the connection with the State straightforward. This is not to say, of course, that these events amount to a mere confrontation among States without any artistic or sporting merit – far from it. Yet, their politicization is inevitable and – especially following the invasion of Ukraine – often pervasive.
This is precisely why festivals like Slavika feel like a breath of fresh air, offering a sense of freedom from the intrusiveness of what Belgian philosopher Anton Jäger labelled “hyperpolitics” – the constant ideologization of our smallest actions. At Slavika – safe in the reassurance that everyone there equally condemned Russia’s attack on Ukraine – one could explore what inspires a Russian poet on a purely intimate level, while also understanding how the war has impacted their work, right after having attended a Ukrainian translation workshop and just before a presentation of Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov’s book Our daily war.
Slavika Festival in Turin, Italy 2026
The organizers, a Turin-based organization called Polski Kot, have, over the past nine years of the festival, created an open environment in which visitors can explore not only cultures, but people. This focus on human perspectives was reflected in both the sessions and in the people who attended them.
There, you might have encountered Siniša, a former basketball player from Belgrade’s Red Star Basketball Club, who has been living in Turin for the past twenty years and came to watch Croatian director Jure Pavlović’s The lost dream team. The film, which deeply moved the audience and transported viewers back to August 1991, served as a perfect synecdoche for the whole festival, trying to answer a simple question: what happened to Jugoslavia’s national basketball team – until that moment arguably the strongest in the world – when a war dismantling the country itself broke out in the middle of their European cup tournament?
You may have also heard the story of Almina, a Bosnian citizen who fled besieged Sarajevo as a child and has been living in Francavilla al Mare, Italy, ever since her parents told her they were all going “on holiday” during the conflict. Her thirty-plus-year “vacation” – reconstructed in a documentary by Davor Marinković – is a powerful portrayal of a child’s experience of war and how her dreams, ambitions and history were influenced by it.
By focusing on these human perspectives, Slavika succeeds as a festival. Spaces of coexistence, exploration and understanding like the one Polski Kot has created are much needed in our rapidly polarizing, fast-judging world: for it is through reconnecting with others on this personal, human level that bridges between cultures are formed.
