The international organisation promoting sustainable tourism, Green Destinations, has included the opening event of European Capital of Culture Tartu 2024 among the top 100 best initiatives of the year. The grand opening ceremony of the title year, which took place this January, focused, among other things, on accessibility and sustainability.
“Caring for each other, considering one another, and mutual cooperation were the core guiding principles in planning and executing the entire Tartu 2024 opening ceremony, ‘All Is One.’ One of the event’s goals was to create an accessible and inclusive environment where all participants, including people with special needs, families, the elderly, and non-Estonian speakers, would feel welcome and included – whether performing on stage, attending as viewers, or watching the broadcast,” said the chief producer of the opening ceremony, Heigo Teder.
The opening of the Capital of Culture highlighted Tartu’s commitment to creating inclusive and sustainable cultural events. The opening event employed various accessibility solutions, such as live description and sign language interpretation, plain language translation, an accessible platform, free public transport, and more.
The event was also unique because of its timing and location, as the production took place in the heart of winter, on and around the River Emajõgi, posing a real challenge for the organisers. More than 30,000 people attended the celebrations in Tartu city centre and at the Estonian National Museum, while over 231,000 viewers from both Estonia and abroad followed the broadcast.
In 2021, Tartu 2024 introduced guidelines for organising environmentally friendly events, offering instructions on how to minimise the environmental impact of cultural events.
Triin Siimer, Manager of Tartu With Earth Programme Line at Tartu 2024, said that the implementation of the eco-friendly event guidelines has gone very well, and people no longer view reusable tableware, waste sorting, and reuse with scepticism. All of the more than one thousand events in Tartu and Southern Estonia under the Capital of Culture programme have been organised according to unified environmentally friendly principles. “With the organisation of the Capital of Culture events, we have proven that it is possible to reduce unnecessary waste to near-zero, even at large events. This gives confidence and encouragement for other organisers across Estonia and the world to adopt the same model,” said Siimer.
Previously, Tartu has submitted the following success stories to the Top 100 competition: the bike-sharing scheme and city buses running on biogas (2020), the Car-Free Avenue (2021), the guidelines for organising environmentally friendly events (2022), and the green corridor on the port railway (2023). All success stories were selected among the top 100. The 2020 success story was awarded second place in the Environment and Climate category, and the 2021 success story was nominated among the top six in the same category. This year’s nominations were revealed during the world’s leading tourism fair, ITB Berlin.
Explore all of Tartu’s success stories here: www.visittartu.com/tartu-is-green-destination.
For more information: Annika Ojasaar, Head of Tourism, Tartu County Tourism Foundation, +372 5886 7883, annika.ojasaar@visittartu.com; www.greendestinations.org.