Colours of Ostrava

Colours of Ostrava fills the former Dolni Vitkovice ironworks, blast furnaces and factory halls that went cold in 1998, with nineteen stages and more than 350 programme items across four July days, from major music acts to theatre, film and discussion panels. Grown from a small 2002 gathering on Ostrava's Stodolni Street into one of Central Europe's largest multi-genre festivals, it draws up to fifty thousand spectators.

Colours of Ostrava began in 2002 as a modest gathering along Stodolni Street, a strip of bars in the Czech Republic's third-largest city, and in the central park of Cerna louka, before outgrowing that setting entirely and relocating in 2012 to Dolni Vitkovice, a former ironworks complex whose blast furnaces and industrial towers had gone cold in 1998 after more than a century and a half of continuous production.