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queues outside ice cream parlours or tucking into restaurant meals. EPP is a model of intimate otherness and integration. It doesn’t take over the city. It merges into it…

One of the secrets of its success is its programming policy. Everything happens on a scale which permits the festival-goer to comfortably attend most or all shows, or bunk off. For example, the ice cream-minded can slope off for a scoop or two of lody (‘ice cream’, a Polish word to memorise) or frozen yogurt indulgence and be back two acts later. Why? Poland has ways and flavours to rival Italian gelato culture in terms of simple or guilty pleasures and frozen extravagances.

Naturally, the piwo (beer), on-site or off, is typically good, too.

Lech, the city’s most famous brewery, put the city on Europe’s ‘beer-drinking map’ and there are people willing to pour the local brew for local prices on the green. On the other hand, ‘off-site’, about a 30-minute walk away in the Old Town (Stare Miasto), the light and airy Chmielnik pub (complete with hopyard in the rear garden) on Ulica Zydowska, is a world removed, and a preferred haven for holding meetings, jawing and interviewing. Everything is to be experienced at Polish prices.

point of which is the Old Town Square. Apologies if this sounds like it’s turning into a weekend travel supplement article; the author studied, researched and partook assiduously just for you.

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Throughout the year the city hosts myriad cultural and trade events; their range and diversity is to marvel at. They range from Gay Pride and the Enea Spring Break Showcase Festival & Confer- ence to the Wieniawski Competitions. In 2017 the Zamek Culture Centre – the location for EPP since 2013 – also held Poland’s first exhibition of works by the Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, ending in January 2018. The 2018 Design Festival has Biodi- versity as its focus. Even if one sees few non-white faces or signs of multiculturalism in the streets, the city’s outward-reaching world- view is important.

As Marcin Kostaszuk, the deputy director of the local Depart- ment of Culture points out, “Our government in Warsaw is radical-

ly to the right but our mayor in Poznań belongs to a very different party.” Wojciech Mania, project manager at the Poznań Tourism Organisation, adds, “I’m talking from the tourism point of view, of

course… In the Polish political system, local administration, local governments have a lot of independence from central govern- ment, so it produces a lot of tensions on three levels – central, local, and in between, the regional.”

Kostaszuk is reflective about the festival’s ethos and its cultur- al and economic drive. “The economic sense was not one of the main factors for the Zamek cultural centre building this festival. In our country I think the important thing is to create events that bring in ideas from the outside world because after the communist era we were completely closed. We didn’t see anything! 1991 was

own the years the dates when EPP takes place have been concentrated over various long weekends in June (although in 2012 they broke the rule by bump- ing it to August). Sometimes it coincides, as in 2017, with the city’s traditional Saint John’s Fair, the focal

Photo: Jan Plotowski