Ondrejana Zatek remembers the Pittsburgh Folk Festival the way most Pittsburghers remember the summers of their childhood: as something that simply was, as fixed as the rivers and the bridges. For six decades, the festival drew crowds into the city each year to eat pierogies, watch folk dancers from a dozen nations, and remember that Pittsburgh was never just a steel town. It was always a world city in miniature.
The festival ran continuously from its founding until 2016, then went quiet. The pandemic ended any remaining momentum. For years, it looked like the tradition might be gone for good.
Zatek would not accept that. She went to the board of Pittsburgh Folk Festival, Inc. and made the case: the cultural moment was right, a new generation was hungry for exactly this kind of experience, and Pittsburgh's immigrant communities were still here, still dancing, still cooking, still eager to share. The board agreed. On Saturday, August 1, A Taste of the Pittsburgh Folk Festival returns to Our Lady of Victory Maronite Church in Beechview, running from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
The one-day event is built around the proposition that Pittsburgh's strength has always come from its layers. The Kyiv Ukrainian Dance Ensemble will perform alongside the Bhutanese Community Association of Pittsburgh, the Shovlin Academy of Irish Dance, and the Isartaler Bavarian Club, which has kept Bavarian folk traditions alive in Western Pennsylvania for generations. The Grecian Odyssey Dancers will not only perform but lead a dance lesson open to any attendee willing to step onto the grass.
Perhaps the most unlikely act on the bill is Peaceful Forest, a performing ensemble led by Takumi Kato, an award-winning taiko drummer from Japan, who tours with his three children. Since 2022, they have performed more than 700 times across 41 states in pursuit of a singular goal: 1,000 performances in all 50 states. Pittsburgh is one stop on that journey, and it is a fitting one.
Food as Cultural Biography
The food program mirrors the performance lineup in its range. La Catedral brings Mexican street tacos; Steel City Chimneys serves the original Pittsburgh chimney cake, a Hungarian kürtöskalács made from sweet yeasted dough rolled over a spit and caramelized over coals. The Saucy African offers West African-inflected dishes, and Mobile Chef World Fusion rounds out the menu with dishes that cross multiple culinary traditions. For Zatek, the food is not a sideshow. It is the point. "Experience a little bit of taste of not only your heritage," she says, "but a taste around the world."
There will also be cooking demonstrations, cultural crafts for children spanning more than a dozen nationalities, and an exhibition of paintings by the late Hedy O'Beil, a Polish-Jewish and Austrian-descended New York artist whose work was recognized by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Her estate is participating in the festival to bring fine art into a context that would have felt natural to her: a celebration of cultures in dialogue.
The decision to hold the event at Our Lady of Victory Maronite Church in Beechview is itself a small statement about how Pittsburgh's neighborhood fabric works. The South Hills has long been home to communities whose roots run through Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and the Maronite parish has been an anchor for that part of the city's story. Hosting a festival that stretches from Bhutanese dance to Bavarian oompah within those walls is not a contradiction. It is a continuation.
What Zatek hopes people take home is not just a full stomach and a pleasant afternoon, though both seem likely. She hopes the day creates the kind of connection that Pittsburgh's industrial past once forced on its residents by necessity, and that now has to be chosen deliberately. "I hope they find a love for not only their heritage, but understand and accept everybody else's," she says. "How beautiful it is."
Tickets are $5 and available through Eventbrite. The festival runs 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. at Our Lady of Victory Maronite Church in Beechview. For the full schedule and vendor list, visit pittsburghfolkfestival.org.