Multicultural Festival “Castelwave”

The International Multicultural Festival “Castelwave” will be held from 18 to 20 September 2026 at the Ivo Andrić Nobel Prize Winner’s House in Herceg Novi. The festival is organized by the NGO “Trabakul” with the support of JUK “Hercegfest”.

Over the course of three days, artists and performers from Japan, Germany, Türkiye and Serbia will be presented. The program connects Tokyo, Berlin and Belgrade with Herceg Novi, and the festival will also have a winter edition in March.

• Friday, 18 September, at 6 and 7 p.m.: The festival will open with a traditional Japanese tea ceremony, which is included on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Japan. The program will be led by Milijana Vujaklija (Belgrade), an educator from Japan’s Edosenke school of tea, with guest Ai Keto (Tokyo), a third-rank master of calligraphy. In addition to the tea preparation ritual, Ai Keto will present the traditional kimono and Japanese etiquette. The ceremony will be held at two different times due to public interest. In his work Unrest, Andrić wrote “A Story of Japan” and was the first in our literature to mention the word Japan.
• Saturday, 19 September, at 6 p.m.: Turkish-German artist Nezaket Ekiçi will perform “Homage to Andrić”, inspired by the novel The Bridge on the Drina. Three high school students from Herceg Novi will participate in the program, while quotations from the novel will be read in Montenegrin, German and Turkish.
• Sunday, 20 September, at 7 p.m.: The Montenegrin premiere of the experimental documentary film “Maga 1909”, directed by Branka Pavlović from Belgrade, will be shown. The film was produced as a German-Serbian co-production and explores through dance the life of journalist, intellectual and feminist Magi Magazinović. Magazinović was Andrić’s contemporary and wrote for the newspaper Politika, in which Andrić also published his stories.