The Stories Festival itself is not a new story. It began back in 2019 as part of the “Kaunas – European Capital of Culture 2022” program. From the very beginning, it brought together museum workers, artists, storytellers, communities, and people interested in the city’s stories, inviting them to explore Kaunas through different narratives, experiences, and unexpected city places.
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Today, this festival idea is continued by the Kaunas City Museum. The themes, people, and storytelling forms change, but the principle remains – to seek ways to better understand the city, oneself, and others through stories.
“For four days, stories will travel through the city via different channels: through cinema, music, painting, walking, or silence. In some places, the signal will be very clear, in others – it will break, get lost, or require listening carefully. The festival will invite noticing how we create relationships with the city, other people, and the environment around us,” says Toma Buivydaitė, Head of Communications at the Kaunas City Museum.
From the first signal to silence
The festival program is arranged as a four-day journey, where the connection gradually changes its form.
On September 24, the festival will open with an event dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Lithuanian radio. Once, radio created a new opportunity for people, cities, and states to connect over distance, and after a hundred years, its story will become an excuse to meet in person. The opening evening will feature Martynas Kavaliauskas and the Kaunas Rubinis Choir.
Friday’s program includes technology, city memory, cinema, and music. At the Lithuanian Aviation Museum, a special exhibition created for the Stories Festival will open, where historical radio devices and fragments of aircraft instrument panels will tell about the connection between earth and sky. The exhibition will be accompanied by a discussion about what really happens in the pilot’s cabin when communication becomes not a convenience but a necessity. The discussion will be moderated by Dr. Simonas Jazavita, director of the Kaunas City Museum.
On the same day, the latest publication in the Kaunas City Museum album series, “Kaunas through the eyes of Stanislovas Lukošius: A Man (not) in his time,” inviting the city to be seen through the photographer’s gaze, will be presented at the Kaunas Town Hall. At the “Romuva” cinema center, the screening of the film “Secret Agent” will be accompanied by a discussion with sociologist Dr. Milda Pivoriūtė and film scholar, critic, and curator Dr. Mantė Valiūnaitė about whether the cinema hall can still create a sense of community. Their conversation will be moderated by Kotryna Lingienė. Friday will conclude with an acoustic concert by Lukas Pilkauskas in the courtyard of the M. and K. Petrauskas House Museum.
On Saturday, the festival will move to the city streets and public spaces. On the “Musical Žaliakalnis” tour, museum worker Deimantė Kondrotaitė will introduce places where Kaunas’s musical life thrived and tell stories about people who created the city’s cultural rhythm.
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Artist Linas Kaziulionis will present the performance “Leaked Stories.” Listening to a live narration about lies, information gaps, and broken connections, the artist will create a painting in real time, where facts, emotions, and fiction merge into one image. After the festival, the work will become a temporary public installation at the URMAS shopping town.
Saturday’s program will be complemented by a discussion at the Kaunas Town Hall about Lithuanian and Polish relations, accompanying Martynas Zaleskis’s 19th-century cityscape exhibition “View of Kaunas.” Historians Andrzej Pukšto and Remigijus Civinskas will talk about shared heritage, cultural memory, historical tensions, and current cooperation opportunities. The discussion will be moderated by historian Domas Boguševičius.
On Sunday, the festival will offer an almost opposite experience – to speak less and be more. At the VDU Botanical Garden, specially created experiential “silent” walking tours will take place three times a day. At sensory stations, visitors will explore the environment through plants, sounds, and scents, and at one station, a musical experience by Jokūbas Goscevičius, educator of the Kaunas City Museum’s National Music Department, will await.
Meanwhile, family tours will take place at the Lithuanian Zoo, inviting participants to look at the human-animal relationship through stories, observation, and responsibility for another living being. One of the tours will be led by Kaunas City Museum educator Simona Sprainaitytė, who will present animals from the perspective of history and culture. The Botanical Garden and Zoo are also creating a joint route for this day: visitors will be able to travel between both spaces with a special map and complete tasks.
Thus, over four days, the festival will travel from the technology that allowed people to communicate over distance to experiences that do not require words at all.
The Stories Festival will take place in Kaunas from September 24 to 27, 2026. Most of the festival events are free. The full program and information about registration and tickets will be published here.
