Children’s festival opens in Herzogenburg with 600 activities

Lower Austria’s Children’s Summer Games opened in Herzogenburg on Friday, with almost 600 activities planned across two weekends, ORF reported. The festival, known as NÖKISS, describes itself as Austria’s largest children’s festival.

The programme includes workshops and hands-on activities at the Augustinian canons’ monastery in Herzogenburg. In one music workshop, children turn plastic tubing into working flutes by drilling and gluing the pieces together.

More than 1,200 volunteers help organise the event each year. Its six stages offer around 60 hours of children’s theatre, songs, puppet shows and ballet, according to the organisers.

Other activities include a reading corner, craft stations, an experiment park, a climbing wall, inflatable play areas and an obstacle course called Gladiator. One craft activity allows children to make a Nein-Horn or a Schlangeweile, a snake that is always bored.

The festival attracts thousands of children and adults to the monastery’s gardens, halls and corridors. Parent Alexander Wahl said the wide-ranging programme could be tiring, but that seeing the children laugh made it worthwhile.

NÖKISS is taking place from August 28 to 30 and from September 4 to 6. Day tickets are available only online, with numbers limited and shown on the event website. There are no ticket counters at the venue, and the festival will go ahead in all weather.