The anniversary program, under the artistic direction of the Music Theatre Company Rafi, will feature, for the first time, seven unique events from 3 to 17 August 2025, specially designed for the Festival. The highlight are the collaboration with the Africa Moment Intercultural Institute of Barcelona, as well as the invitation of Ivorian choreographer Oulouy, distinguished at Aerowaves 2025, for a new version of the performance Black, a project dedicated to issues of equality and freedom.

A special moment in this year’s program is the presence of Ari Tavares, a beatboxer and electroacoustic composer from Cape Verde. Following an artistic residency in Lemnos last May, Tavares presents a sonic tribute to (Little) Cyclades by Little Cyclades, in collaboration with the acclaimed composer and performer Martha Mavroeidi, bridging traditional musical heritage with contemporary experimentation.

One of the most exciting contemporary European creators, Euripides Laskaridis, presents for the first time in Greece the visual art installation Metamorphoses as a Toycurated by Stamatis Schizakis. Commissioned by the Kournos Music Festival, the exhibition will be hosted at the Museum of Children’s Toys and Books throughout the Festival. The hybrid installation combines the sensitivity of children’s imagination with the theatricality and corporeality of Laskaridis’s work, focusing on the concept of metamorphosis—not as drama, but as a playful act of freedom and self-reinvention.

In the field of classical music, the Kournos Music Festival 2025 expands its artistic collaborations, presenting two significant partnerships that bridge tradition with contemporary creation, and music with place.

In collaboration with the versatile soprano Aphrodite Patoulidou and composer Apostolis Koutsogiannis, the festival premieres the cantata Vrykolax en Kabeirio/ Vrykolax en Kabeirio, a new musical composition inspired by old, local, and new myths about vampires. The production is part of the Ministry of Culture initiative “All of Greece, One Culture 2025” and will take place at the iconic archaeological site of the Kabeiria, highlighting the timeless power of culture in its place of origin.

At the same time, world-renowned baritone Dimitris Platanias visits Lemnos for the first time for a unique concert with the distinguished pianist Sofia Tambakopoulou. The concert will be held in Moudros, at the historic 19th-century stone elemetary school—a preserved educational institution in the Northern Aegean still in operation today. For a single night, this historic site of learning and memory will become a stage for exceptional musical performance.

Finally, one of the most distinguished creators of greek songs, Nikos Xydakis, collaborates with the young composer and performer Nikos Antonopoulos —creator of the musical performance Blue Thread at this year’s Subset of the Athens & Epidaurus Festival—and the dynamic accordionist Konstantinos Zigκeridis, in a special poetry and music event. Marking forty years since the release of the iconic album Mania, written for the film of the same name by Giorgos Panousopoulos—a mural of absurd and natural beings in the National Garden of Athens—the performance offers a contemporary reconstruction of the work through new sonic and poetic narratives. The music engages in dialogue with the contemporary visual language of the emerging artist Eva Papamargariti, whose uncanny sculptures animate the interwar garden of a school in Lemnos, creating a hybrid space of memory, transformation, and dreamlike conversation between past and present.

All events of the Kournos Music Festival are open to the public with free entry.