Vilnius will be painted pink again – MadeinVilnius.lt

Last year, the Vilnius Pink Soup Fest (Vilnius Pink Soup Fest), which attracted a lot of attention from the townspeople and foreign guests, will be even bigger and brighter this year, and it will be led by the most cheerful pair of presenters: Italian chef Gian Luca Demarco and TV presenter, producer Mindaugas Stasiulis. The heart of the festival will remain the Tymos Market in the Old Town, and visitors ready for adventure will be treated to a special slide that allows them to descend from the Barbican Hill and plunge into an artificial bowl of ice floes.

A celebration that was long overdue

M. Stasiulis and GL Demarco, the presenters of last year’s and the future festival, unanimously claim that such an event is not only work for them, but also great pleasure. The team of presenters notices that many Lithuanian holidays are quite serious, and during the Vilnius šaltibarščių festival you can simply have fun and be silly.

“I remember the foreigners’ wide-eyed amazement as they watched people dressed in the funniest pink costumes twirl in clouds of foam and slide down a mountain into a bowl of artificial icicles. We really needed such entertainment, because it seemed that the whole of Vilnius came to the festival with its many guests to cheer. It was a celebration for everyone: a student, a senior, a child or a middle-aged person – who ate ice cream, who looked at artists’ installations, and who skated headlong down the Barbican Hill. If the Spanish town of Bunolo has a festival of fighting with tomatoes, and in Pamplona there is a running of the bulls through the old town, then Vilnius simply cannot not have one crazy of the event as a frost festival”, says M. Stasiulis.

GL Demarco is also surprised that before the last event in Vilnius, he had not seen so many smiling people, and with the audience in a joyful mood and involved in the action, a connection appeared in a flash: for this reason, he sees the meaning of his work as a presenter in such celebrations.

At last year’s festival, about 170 participants came down the slide from Barbican Hill, dressed not only in pink clothes and accessories, but also in special costumes: for example, they dressed up as cold soup fairies and hid their faces under handmade dill, egg, beet and cucumber masks. Therefore, this year the participants are also encouraged to create their most beautiful frostbite costume, which will be chosen in the election of the most beautiful costume.

In the summer, not blood flows through the veins of a Lithuanian, but chills

It is common that when the temperature starts to rise a little, the refrigerators of most Lithuanians are replenished with the necessary ingredients for the production of cold bars. Mr. Stasiulis says that he would eat this soup every day and sometimes he makes it even in winter.

“There are various variations of cold borscht, omitting the beets or even adding milk, but I like the classic ones, for which I do not use special kefir, but rather leaner, because it tastes better to me. I also like to serve fresh small fries on the side: I turn them over, then fry them a little in a frying pan and roast them in the oven with butter,” the TV host shares his culinary habits.

And GL Demarco, who has started a family with a Lithuanian woman, admits that from now on he has to accept that a summer without stilbis is not even summer, because they are prepared at home almost every day. “I love them, but there is one nuance – when I eat them enthusiastically, I always splash my white shirt and have a pink color like a seal,” jokes the Italian chef.

Lithuanian cold soups are the world’s elite of cold soups

Cold soups, which look unusual to others, but familiar to us since childhood, deserve their own celebration: www.tasteatlas.com website recently announced that they are the tastiest cold soup in the world. It is not for nothing that during the last festival 1 ton of šliboršči was eaten, and about 15 thousand people visited it. visitors – much more are expected this year.

According to the organizers of the festival, Dovilė Aleksandravičienė, head of Vilnius tourism and business development agency “Go Vilnius”, this year it is planned to offer even more entertainment to the visitors of the event, as the news about it is already spreading around European capitals.

“Last year, we saw the enthusiasm of both Lithuanian and foreign guests at the event, so we have no doubt that this year, many more guests will visit the festival. This year, we are paying special attention to publicizing the festival abroad and attracting foreign tourists to it, we feel great interest from foreign journalists who see the festival as an innovative presentation of our capital. With this festival, we aim not only to speak loudly about Vilnius as a capital full of gastronomic experiences, but also to create a world-famous tradition attributed to Vilnius, such as the Bavarian Oktoberfest or the Neapolitan pizza festival. In addition, such a festival strengthens the city’s awareness and image, it also generates economic benefits – we estimate that last year the festival generated about 200,000 for various sectors of the city. EUR economic benefits”, says D. Aleksandravičienė.