XLSIOR 2025: reading the festival through its venues

The catalogue advertises WE as the Thursday 21 August opening, followed by Carioca at Zenit Starlight on Friday 22 and the Beach Party at Neven on Saturday 23. Sunday 24 carries two entries: Sundia at Axel Beach and Olympics at Cavo Paradiso. MEAT is assigned to Zenit Underground on Monday 25. Together and Muccassassina share Axel Beach on Tuesday 26, with separate afternoon/evening and late-evening slots.

This is more than a list of evening performances. Sundia is advertised from 13:00 to 22:00, while MEAT is billed as official after-hours, from 07:00 to 13:00. The final day pairs Together, 18:00–22:00, with Muccassassina, 22:00–02:00. These are the catalogue’s announced hours, not verified opening or finishing times. They show how the offer extended across daylight, late night and morning.

The overview combines the two closing parties in one row; the individual posters separate them. Counting rows alone would therefore obscure the design. The telling unit is the pairing of a named party with a space and a time of day. That is what gives the programme its rhythm, even before we know how any visitor actually followed it.

Paradise is an important geographical reference, but it should not flatten the programme’s different venues into one beach party. Zenit’s own address identifies Paradise Beach. A Resident Advisor listing for a different Neven event on 4 July 2025, administered as NevenMykonos, also places that venue at Paradise Beach. This supports the area named for Neven during that season; it does not locate the precise site intended for XLSIOR on 23 August.

The two Zenit labels also deserve to remain separate. The catalogue assigns Carioca to Starlight and the morning MEAT slot to Underground. That distinction is part of the organiser’s proposition. It is not, on its own, a licence to describe the rooms, their capacity, their atmosphere or the route between them. Those details would require venue records or observation beyond the programme.

For orientation, the existing Atlas identifies Cavo Paradiso beside Paradise Beach. It is a geographical reference, not a reconstruction of the festival route. The unannounced opening venue stays unannounced in this account: a venue from another year, or an unidentified party photograph, cannot fill that blank.

Axel Beach appears for Sundia and both closing slots. Within this document, a hotel is therefore a repeated programme location, not simply somewhere a ticket-holder might sleep. The hotel’s current official address is Vrysi; the word Beach in the brand should not be read as evidence that these sessions were on a named beach.

This repetition suggests an anchor in the proposed itinerary: a place to which the programme returns after directing attention elsewhere. It does not tell us whether participants stayed there, attended all three sessions or used the same facilities each time. What can be read is the allocation of functions. Accommodation and programmed sociability occupy the same named property in the festival’s offer.

A separate catalogue page explains how to reach the parties and advertises XLSIOR buses from the old port. The inclusion matters: the festival was advertising connections between locations as well as individual gatherings. For a programme distributed across the island, the interval between parties is part of its practical design.

The surviving timetable cannot reliably reconstruct those journeys. Sundia’s transport window does not match its full advertised session, and the MEAT entry pairs a morning party with evening/night bus text. These discrepancies do not prove that services failed, nor establish why the entries differ. They do prevent us from presenting the page as an account of buses that actually ran.

The same care is needed at midnight. Olympics appears under Sunday 24 August in the catalogue, with midnight–08:00, whereas the Duke of Mykonos listing gives 23:00 on 24 August to 07:00 on 25 August. Neither advertised record establishes actual doors or closing time. The venue attribution is usable; a definitive hour-by-hour reconstruction is not.

XLSIOR describes itself as an international gay summer festival. Its programme is evidence of an organised offer to that audience, not a census of queer life on Mykonos. It gives us no defensible measure of residents’ experiences, local acceptance, attendance, spending or the identities of everyone who entered a venue. Those are different questions, requiring different sources.

There is a useful comparison with Richard Piro’s personal travel account, published in Vector in March 1973. There, the document offers a remembered encounter and a traveller’s expectations. Here, a promoter offers named places and scheduled gatherings. Reading the two together changes the question from whether Mykonos has one timeless identity to how different kinds of travel writing make it imaginable. It does not establish a direct historical line from Piro to XLSIOR.

The organiser’s 2025 gallery groups photographs under Beach Party, WE Party, Carioca and Olympics. That is a second kind of festival record, but its headings do not verify every billed artist, advertised hour or programme entry. A complete retrospective would need dated captions, final venue confirmation and reporting from participants, staff and organisers. The images accompanying this analysis are separately dated location photographs; they do not document XLSIOR 2025.

This is a reading of a past programme, not advice for attending a future edition. Current listings belong in What’s On, with their own dates and evidence. Keeping those functions apart allows the 2025 catalogue to remain useful as a historical document after its practical instructions have expired.