The story
Visagino Country in Visaginas
Visagino Country is the Baltic states' largest country music festival, held each August since 1991 on a lakeside stadium stage in Visaginas. The two-day, family-friendly event draws more than twenty thousand attendees and touring musicians from Europe, North America, and Australia. The town itself was built in the 1970s to house workers for the nearby Ignalina nuclear plant, giving the festival an unusually specific post-industrial cultural backdrop distinct from Lithuania's other summer festivals.
In Visaginas, a planned Soviet-era town built to house workers for the nearby Ignalina nuclear power plant, an unlikely cultural tradition has taken root since 1991: the largest country music festival in the Baltic states, held each August on a large stage within the town's stadium grounds near the lake.