I was supposed to visit Pyrkon in 2020 – and as it was the case with most cons that year I didn’t get the chance. The team decided not to go into online form (although they made some other online events, as well as in person fairs during the pandemic). All in all the Pyrkon 2022 was the first that took place after three years that passed since 2019.
Pyrkon 2019 – queuing surprise
During the last few years Pyrkon has become an important convention for me (and for thousands other SFF fans in Poland). With the convention growing bigger and bigger my approach towards it have shifted, but it was – and still is – a convention I keepdoing my best to attend every year. Still, when writing about it now, I have to mention one issue. Pyrkon is too big for me to be able to grasp everything that goes on during this convention. My report below is not really a Pyrkon 2019 report. It is merely a report on a small part of the con.
Pyrkon – huge as always
It has been a while since Pyrkon but I have started my GUFF trip just after the convention and therefore I didn’t have time to write about the con before. Now I am trying to recollect my memories and this is not so easy after three weeks I have spent in Australia doing fannish things. There is however one thing that stick to my memory apart from the size of this convention – guests.
Pyrkon 2017 convention of many queues
Pyrkon is the biggest Polish convention – last year there were over 40 000 people. This year the number of participants has not been yet announced but I really doubt it will be significantly smaller. Being so big has some perks but also some disadvantages. All in all Pyrkon is doing a great job promoting SF/F and overall geekiness, however for me this edition wasn’t as good as the previous ones.
Understanding Polish conventions
The first topic I have chosen for this blog is not an easy one: I want to present what is important for Polish conventions. I wanted to extract the core of convention-going. However, the only way I can look at Polish cons from the outside is to try to compare them to foreign conventions I have attended (mainly Eurocons and Worldcon). This comparison is not ideal as both Eurocons and Worldcons are very specific events. Still, this is the best option so I will be using this imperfect comparison. Continue reading “Understanding Polish conventions”