Garbicz Festival

History

Garbicz Festival grew out of the ashes of Bar25, the improvised club that ran on the banks of Berlin's Spree river from 2003 until developers forced it to close in 2010. A group from that scene, organized as the Bachstelzen Collective alongside the Holzmarkt 25 Cooperative (the team behind Bar25's spiritual successor, Kater Blau), spent the following winter of 2012 scouting a new kind of site, not a club, but somewhere with enough space and distance to build a different kind of gathering. They found it on the shore of Lake Wielicko, next to the small village of Garbicz in Poland's Lubusz Voivodeship, about two hours east of Berlin and just across the German border.

The first edition ran in the summer of 2013, drawing a few hundred people to a lakeside site with no template to follow. It has grown steadily since into an international gathering, reportedly pulling in the range of eight to ten thousand visitors from across Europe each year, without ever losing the founders' original instinct for scale over spectacle. The festival now runs across five days and multiple stages built directly into the forest and along the water, including a floating dancefloor known as Moos Floos and a dedicated ambient area called Lichtung set aside for slower, more exploratory programming alongside the techno and house on the main floors.

What sets Garbicz apart from most festivals of its size is how deliberately it has stayed anti-commercial. There is no brand sponsorship in the booking, and the festival's head of production, Fritz "Windisch" Dyckerhoff, has described a flat pay structure where, in his words, all headliners get the same money and all residents get the same money, a rejection of the tiered fee system that shapes most festival lineups. Ticket revenue is reinvested directly into the site and the following year's production rather than extracted as profit, consistent with the same non-commercial ethos that Bar25 and Kater Blau were built on in Berlin.

That independence was tested directly in 2019, when the mayor of Torzym, the municipality that includes Garbicz, refused to renew the festival's permit days before it was due to start, after six consecutive years of approval. The stated reason was the site's location inside a Natura 2000 protected nature reserve, though reporting at the time also pointed to friction over local politics between organizers and the mayor's office. The decision was overturned on appeal by the regional government of Gorzów Wielkopolski just two days before the gates were due to open, and the festival went ahead as planned. It was a reminder that Garbicz's setting, part of what makes it distinctive, also makes it structurally precarious in a way that has become common across Europe's festival landscape in recent years, where permitting and local politics increasingly decide whether an outdoor event happens at all, not just how it sounds.

Today Garbicz sits alongside a small group of European festivals, CTM and Time Warp among them on this site's own list, that built a reputation on musical identity and site-specific atmosphere rather than headliner arms races. Its lineups lean into techno, house and more experimental, ambient-leaning programming, and its audience skews toward people who have been coming back for years rather than first-timers chasing a single act.

FAQ

How do you get to Garbicz Festival?

The site sits in Torzym municipality in western Poland, roughly two hours by road from Berlin. The nearest train station is Rzepin, about a 20-minute taxi ride from the festival grounds.

What's the festival's approach to booking and pay?

Organizers have described a flat fee structure where headliners and resident DJs are paid the same rate, and the festival runs without brand sponsorship, reinvesting ticket revenue into the site rather than treating it as a profit center.

Has Garbicz Festival ever been cancelled or at risk of cancellation?

Yes. In 2019, the mayor of Torzym denied the festival's permit days before it was scheduled to start, citing the site's protected Natura 2000 status after six years of prior approval. A regional appeals court overturned the decision two days before the festival opened, and it went ahead as planned.