Unique Calendar of Events, One Click away from the Citizens

The project ‘CultTour’, which is a unique web portal of cultural events in the City of Novi Sad, started on 15 March, and it was presented to the public at the Youth Forum in Cultural Centre of Novi Sad. This is one of the projects within the process of bidding for title of European Capital of Culture in 2021, and the idea was to create an internet portal that will be a register of cultural events in Novi Sad for their better promotion and availability. The portal is unique because Novi Sad has not had a ‘calendar’ of cultural events, it is modern and it will be of great help to all citizens.

Member of the City Council in charge of culture, Vanja Vučenović, said that this portal is an important element in the culture of Novi Sad, something a lot of cities don’t have and something that will certainly help the intention of the current city government to place the culture and quality of cultural life in the city on a higher level.

– We got a real register of cultural events in the city that will make culture of Novi Sad accessible to all citizens, which is the intention of all of us who work in culture. I invite all those who work in culture to respond to the call and participate in the work of this informative website, so that citizens could be notified about events that are organised. This is a way to show that Novi Sad is culturally developed and that there are few cities that have so many manifestations as Novi Sad. We have the right to say that our city is one of the richest cities when we talk about cultural events in Serbia – said Vučenović.

President of the Organisation Board of the Novi Sad in 2021, Dr Andrej Fajgelj, said that the citizens were asking for this platform and it is pleasure to present it. Now, he added, it only remains for the citizens of Novi Sad to fill it in and use it.

– There has already been more than two years since we invited everyone to work together on becoming European Capital of Culture in 2021. Through a series of participatory events that we organised, we noticed that one thing was singled out. This was the need to put many cultural events of our city, numerous institutions and individual activism in one place. What happens is that people are willing to go to cultural events, but often they don’t know that there are events in the city that would interest them. One of the first things that people and the representatives of the professional public noticed, is that we need to have a common platform, a calendar of cultural events. We have listened to the citizens and we made it happened – said Fajgelj.

Representatives of the ‘Utopia’ Cultural Centre, Miloš Milić and Marko Simić, said that their Centre is a relatively new project and that they want to be engaged in culture in general, so in addition to musical events, the activities of ‘Utopia’ include performances, film screenings, panels and more. They believe that Novi Sad, as one of the culture capitals, needs to have a central place for browsing information about events in the city. Also they said that the cooperation between the private and public sectors in culture is essential.

The portal is also a free service for cultural public and private sectors in the city. The site has a search filter where you can browse cultural events by date, category (exhibitions, concerts, films, shows, festivals and events, promotions and lectures, workshops) and locations (name, address, contact e-mail and phone, website or Facebook page). Furthermore, users of portal can add their own cultural events in the city. Android application will also be available soon. Cultural events can be viewed in Serbian (Cyrillic and Latin) and in English, so they are available to foreign tourists, and all users have a transparent and clear overview of cultural events in Novi Sad.