The Sziget Festival (, ; "Sziget" for "Island") is one of the largest music and cultural festivals in Europe. It is held every August in northern Budapest, Hungary, on Óbudai-sziget ("Old Buda Island"), a leafy 108-hectare (266-acre) island on the Danube. More than 1,000 performances take place each year. The week-long festival has grown from a relatively low-profile student event in 1993 to become one of the prominent European rock festivals, with about half of all visitors coming from outside Hungary, especially from Western Europe. It also has a dedicated "party train" service (with resident DJs) that transports festival-goers from all over Europe. The second event (1994), labelled Eurowoodstock, was headlined by performers from the original Woodstock festival. By 1997, total attendance surpassed the 250,000 mark, and by 2016 reached the 440,000 mark. In 2019 that record was once broken when 565,000 visitors attended the festival. Since the mid 2000s, Sziget Festival has been increasingly labelled as a European alternative to the Burning Man festival due to its unique features ("an electronically amplified, warped amusement park that has nothing to do with reality"). In 2011, Sziget was ranked one of the 5 best festivals in Europe by The Independent. The festival is a two-time winner at the European Festivals Awards in the category Best Major European Festival, in 2011 and 2014. In 2002, Sziget branched out to Transylvania when its organisers co-created a new annual festival there titled Félsziget Fesztivál (Romanian: Festivalul Peninsula) that soon became the largest of its kind in Romania. In 2007, the organisers co-created Balaton Sound, an electronic music festival held on the southern bank of Lake Balaton that quickly gained popularity. History Following the end of the Communist era in 1989, the formerly lively summer festival scene in Budapest faced a crisis due to a sudden loss of governmental funding. A group of artists and rock enthusiasts proposed the Sziget event as a way to bridge this gap. The festival was started in 1993, originally called Diáksziget (Student Island). This first event was organised by music fans in their spare time and ran well over budget, taking until 1997 to repay the losses. From 1996 to 2001 it was sponsored by Pepsi and renamed Pepsi Sziget. It has been called Sziget Fesztivál ("island festival") since 2002. A comprehensive survey was done and published on the risktaking behaviour and mood of Sziget visitors (2007) by the