Trout Festival

Held each August in the Bucovina commune of Ciocănești, the Trout Festival holds the distinction of being the only festival in Europe dedicated entirely to trout, first organised back in 1993. The commune, already known for its brightly painted traditional houses and an annual egg-painting festival held before Easter, adds this culinary celebration to a calendar already rich with regional tradition.

The festival's main attraction is its genuinely enormous scale of communal cooking — in one particularly memorable year, organisers prepared 50 kilograms of trout alongside 40 kilograms of cornmeal polenta, and constructed a decorative display cob using 1,000 smoked trout. Beyond the sheer volume of food, the festival includes fishing competitions, traditional dress parades, wine tastings and folk performances, all set within the scenic Bucovina countryside that has made the region a genuine draw for visitors well beyond this single event.

For anyone with a specific interest in freshwater fish traditions, Ciocănești's festival offers something genuinely singular — not simply a regional specialty fair, but the only event of its kind anywhere on the continent.