Festivals and concerts in

Trikala

The city's first stage is the open-air municipal theatre of the Fortress, nine hundred seats inside the Byzantine castle on the north-east edge of town, above the old quarter of Varousi. There the municipality stages TriKalokairi, a programme of some twenty theatre productions, concerts by the municipal conservatory and the municipal philharmonic and screenings at the municipal open-air cinema, from July to September, with children's events in the neighbourhoods and villages in August. Before that, around 20 to 25 June, European Music Day has been celebrated in Trikala for more than thirty years with five days of free concerts in the conservatory courtyard, at the Fortress theatre, at the Matsopoulos Mill and in the courtyard of the Tsitsanis Museum.

September is the month of the big names, and free at that: the Region of Thessaly's Cultural Summer brings three or four free concerts to Trikala every year, from Dimitra Galani with the Estudiantina in Matsopoulos Park and Giota Nega at Theopetra to Miltos Paschalidis at the Matsopoulos Mill and the Trikala Orchestra in the Tsitsanis Museum courtyard. The stages change from year to year between the Mill, Varousi, Kefalovryso and the surrounding villages, so check the venue on each listing.

Twenty minutes down the road, Kalambaka has its own free concerts on Rigas Feraios Square under the Meteora of Art programme and a rock and blues festival, Echoes of Meteora, in early July, while Pyli holds the Portaikos River Fest around mid-August with a river party and stadium concerts. And a note for anyone looking for the Mill of the Elves: it is the city's Christmas park at the Matsopoulos Mill, from late November to Epiphany, not a summer festival.