Festival Info
Welcome to the Fourth Annual Balkan Chestnut Festival! We hope you enjoy the program we’ve put together for you today. Please be sure to visit our vendors and take some time to explore the farm.
We’d love to see your photos, so please tag us at #BalkanChestnutFestival on Facebook and Instagram.
After you leave today, we hope you’ll take a moment to fill out our brief survey so that we can learn how to help our festival evolve and grow in the future.
About the Festival
The Balkan Chestnut Festival is an annual harvest celebration held at Historic Wyoming Farm in Clinton, Maryland, USA. Its mission is to blend the vibrancy of culture, music, dance, and food with the local community. It aims to attract both festival goers and Balkan culture enthusiasts, while engaging the diaspora communities from the countries of the Balkan peninsula.
In 2016, farm operator, Colin Dunphy, expanded his farm to include chestnut and paw paw orchards. This process gave him insight into the importance of chestnuts to the cultures and cuisines of Southern and Eastern Europe. His personal passion for Balkan music and inspiration from the Serbian Guča Trumpet Festival brought the Balkan Chestnut Festival to life for the first time in October 2018. In 2020, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the festival was held online as a virtual fundraiser, raising over $10,000 for four Balkan-based charities. Now the event has returned to a live outdoor audience.
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Performers
1:00 pm Orchester Prazevica (joined by Cora Phenix)
2:00 pm Szikra
2:40 pm Orfeia
3:10 pm (break)
3:20 pm Zlatne Uste
About the Performers
Cora Phenix (Andreea Rebaltescu-Coca) is the CEO & Founder of Cora Phenix Digital Entrepreneur & Artist. She Graduated Gheorghe Dima Music Academy in Cluj, Romania, and studied drama at the University Babes Bolyai in the same city. She is also an entertainer and published author. She plays an active role in the Romanian diaspora community of Washington, DC, and the surrounding region, and is the Director of Communications for the Romanian United Fund.
Orchester Praževica is a band based out of Columbia, MD, and their high energy dance music blends the tradition of Eastern European Czardas and Roma-style Swing. Slovak born-and-raised guitarist and singer, Tomáš Drgoň, and his band have performed with the brass legends Fanfare Ciocarlia, Boban and Marko Markovic Orchestra, and others.
Szikra plays traditional Hungarian dance music of the Csángó people from Moldva and Gyimes in Romania. Szikra, which means “spark” in Hungarian, formed in 2014 and has performed regularly at cultural events and Hungarian dance house parties (táncház-es) throughout the mid-Atlantic region.
www.tiszaensemble.org/szikra.html
Orfeia is all-woman vocal ensemble is dedicated to preserving and sharing traditional music from Bulgaria and Eastern Europe. Their repertoire spans the rich and diverse musical heritage of Eastern Europe, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Russia and their neighbors.
Zlatne Uste is the premier Balkan Brass Band in North America, whose repertoire spans the most important stops in the traditional music of the Balkans – Serbia, Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Romany traditions. They are the only American band to play at the world famous Guča Trumpet Competition in Serbia, and their story is told in the documentary "Brasslands". They're also the hosts of Brooklyn's annual Golden Festival, which brings together thousands of attendees each year to a weekend of Balkan bands and all-day dancing.
Visit Our Vendors
Wines of Illyria was founded in March 2016 by Indira Bayer, originally from the Former Yugoslavia. This wine import company is dedicated to bringing wines from the Balkan peninsula to American consumers. Her goal was to create jobs for unemployed youth in Bosnia-Herzegovina and stop the brain drain, one of the biggest issues in the country. In addition, Indira wanted to create a positive image of Bosnia-Herzegovina and add it to the list of the world’s well-known wine producing countries. Indira continues to work with both large and small wineries throughout the Balkan Peninsula sourcing and bringing to consumers premium quality wines made of native varieties.
As the Founder and Brand Ambassador of Wines of Illyria, Indira participates in wine shows and organizes wine tastings to educate sales staff and consumers on the over 2000-year long tradition of wine making in the land once known as Illyria.
MezeHub is a new grocery store and warehouse located in Rockville, MD, owned and operated by Edin Saracevic and Doug Wheeler. They specialize in Balkan and other European foods and wines.
Why Balkan, Why Chestnuts
By Colin Dunphy, Owner and Operator of Wyoming Farm and Founder of the Balkan Chestnut Festival
“I started this project thinking every Balkan person loved chestnuts, but I came to find out their situation with chestnuts is similar to ours in the US.
There was a blight 100 years ago that basically wiped out the American Chestnut. It was the most common tree in the east by far supported many economies through timber and nut consumption. They are referenced in countless folk songs and street names, yet most people in USA have never tasted a chestnut or could describe what they look like.
The history of chestnuts in the Balkans is much longer and deeper than in USA. Chestnuts migrated out of Asia into Europe over 20 billion years ago do very well in the mountainous terrain that runs through the Balkans. They are were particularly important around 1000 CE when they were planted heavily to support perennial food systems.
The prestige of chestnuts has waxed and waned through history. They were often the refuge of the poor when there was nothing else to eat. They also represented an opportunity for income as whole families would harvest.
Like the US, chestnuts are not as popular as they once were in the Balkans. The blight had some effect but other diseases also limit orchard health. Climate change is making irrigation necessary and maintenance harder. As the chestnut yields become smaller and smaller, the economies and traditions it supported collapse. The crop becomes niche and expensive.
A raw chestnut is edible but bitter. It tastes like raw potato.
A roasted chestnut is sweet, soft.
A burnt chestnut is hard.”
About the Venue
Wyoming Farm is a young pick-your-own chestnut and pawpaw orchard in Clinton, Maryland. The farm provides historic agritourism, polyculture farming, and event hosting with views overlooking the Piscataway Valley.
"Wyoming” is a nationally registered historic place. It is the ancestral home of the Marbury family who were made famous for the landmark Supreme Court case Marbury v Madison in 1803 that established Judicial Review. The land was parceled and purchased in 1698 as “Appledore” by Francis Marbury. It was a prosperous tobacco farm of about 1,000 acres. Around 1800, the house was built and the name of the farm was changed to “Wyoming” in honor of the battle of Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania, 1778.
Seventy African Americans were enslaved at Wyoming during the period prior to the Civil War. As no housing structures remain, soon guests may use a mobile app to view a life size housing model using augmented reality.
A Marbury family cemetery is onsite including three marked graves and possibly three unmarked graves.
