‘A festival that has made an entire city its playground’: we visit UNTOLD in Romania

Cluj, Romania’s second-most populous city, may feel like an unlikely location for a festival of UNTOLD’s magnitude. With headliners including Steve Aoki, Sting, Kygo, Marshmello and Afrojack, accommodating 500,000 revellers across four days is no easy feat.

Officially one of the world’s largest festivals, UNTOLD Festival is less a festival site and more a temporary city take-over, with the 90,000-capacity Cluj Arena serving as its main stage, while Cluj Central Park, other arenas, stages, tents and even lakeside invite-only parties make up the rest.

For most international travellers, Bucharest, Romania’s capital, monopolises the country’s tourism industry, and it would seem like the obvious location for something of this scale.

Cluj, 277 miles from Bucharest, is a typical Eastern European city steeped in history, if you’re looking for it. Situated in the historical province of Transylvania, bats adorn buildings if you’re looking up at the architecture around you. The city can feel sleepy (I suspect locals who aren’t attending take the opportunity to leave – or work at the festival) while the old town is far livelier, with contemporary coffee shops buzzing during the day and bars spilling into the streets in the evenings.

UNTOLD isn’t entirely a music festival in the traditional sense. Yes, there are multiple acts across genres and fandoms, and yes, there’s the sometimes conflicting scheduling of acts to negotiate. You’ll discover new artists as you navigate the vast territory of the event. But where UNTOLD may come undone for some is its sheer size.

Because attendees are staying in hotels and Airbnbs across the city, leaving and returning to the site parameters each day, and because the festival site fully closes each night, that cohesive, atmospheric feeling of leaving the outside world behind is largely absent. Some have day passes and are there solely for one artist, which is nothing new, but with people able to dip in and out, UNTOLD can feel flatter than it should, perhaps more like a series of day festivals running back-to-back.

That changes when an area fills for a particular artist. In the stadium, especially, you suddenly feel the full, crowd-pleasing impact of the event. A younger crowd sang and danced to Zara Larsson; an older crowd bounced to Flo Rida. House music fans lost their minds, and their T-shirts, to Meduza and R3hab.

On day two, we abandoned our planned schedule and explored the less commercial zones, finding the crowds you’re more likely to come across at festivals. The niche music lovers. One proudly told me he’d never been to the stadium to see an act across the four times he’d attended. It’s in these pockets that you find trap, Afro House, Trance, folk, chill-out, a popular nostalgia stage and Romanian hip-hop.

I spoke with Wolo, a radical DJ balancing his disdain for AI, music software and paid-for stream boosting with an understanding of the need for technological advancement. Fresh from his set at the Daydreaming stage, a space dedicated to deep house and organic instrumentation, he feels old school, but is keen to talk about modern electronica.

A musician’s musician, he plays and loops instruments during his sets but never records them. “I don’t play for the internet; the people in the crowd are who I play for.” He worries that DJs are becoming superstars  “that was never the point”  but commends UNTOLD: “there are so many people here, making so many memories, bringing so many different people and talents together”. He emphasises, “that’s the humanity of music”. 

The sound across every set-up was remarkably good, which isn’t always the case at festivals. Given the scale of UNTOLD, it demonstrated a real commitment to ensuring even the most discerning audiophiles left feeling fulfilled. I noticed sound-desk engineers hyper-focused on their tasks (not always the case) and festival staff everywhere.

The staging was, in places, jaw-dropping. Production on the main stage, including fireworks, was of New Year’s Eve proportions. UNTOLD’S scale certainly doesn’t come at the expense of its creative or technical output.

The crowd is predominantly Eastern European. I doubt it’s the kind of festival you leave having made a dozen new friends, but the daily cab journeys to and from the festival hub are invariably filled with inquisitive drivers who have plenty of conversation.

On the final day, on the advice of a cab driver, we made our way to Lake Tarnița for what was intended to be a relaxing wind-down. The 40-minute journey showcased the stunning Romanian landscape and the far reaches of suburban Cluj.

We arrived at Village by the Lake, a busy, high-end lakeside resort, where Sunnery James & Ryan Marciano sets played across the terraces and a far more affluent crowd danced overlooking the vast lake. Men smoked cigars, champagne bottles arrived with sparklers, floating decks with DJs circled the lake in the background, and people were noticeably more open and chatty.

A happy happenstance, if you squinted you’d believe you were in Ibiza, Mykonos or the South of France. It underscored UNTOLD’S impressive reach and the breadth of its offering – this isn’t simply a festival contained within four walls, but an event that has infiltrated the city and its surrounding landscape.

UNTOLD may feel fragmented, but at this scale, it’s almost impossible for it not to. It requires you to come more prepared than most festivals. You need to know who you’re there for to find your people, how you’re getting home each night, where the parties are happening and how much travelling is involved.

Now an international franchise, UNTOLD has received global acclaim, as it should. It’s a monumental event and a considerable achievement. It may not always deliver the singular, immersive feeling we associate with the best festivals, but perhaps that’s not really what UNTOLD is trying to be.

It’s something bigger, messier and more ambitious: a festival that has made an entire city its playground.