The History and Idea behind the ForestSport
An idea of uniting a „splitted up“ foresters‘ community was born in 2004 when a first crowd-puller „Miško dienos Vėžaičiai‘ 2004“ („Forest Days Vėžaičiai‘ 2004“) has been organized at forester‘s Antanas Garbačauskas farm in Vėžaičiai, Lithuania. The idea behind this event was socialization, sharing the experience and encouraging the creativity of Lithuanian foresters. Subsequently, this event became a nice tradition of coming together and spending the third weekend of August in the „unofficial“ foresters‘ festival. Later the „Forest Days“ got more and more international, and were also organized abroad by an external initiative: in Saaremaa island (Estonia), in Kalsnava Arboretum (Latvia) and in Viljandi (Estonia).
An idea of organizing the open international foresters‘ sports competition arose in early 2013‘s, and the first ForestSport event took place in the 16-18th of August 2013, in Lithuania, at a „habitual“ location – Antanas Garbačauskas farm in Vėžaičiai. Twelve teams from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Poland took part in the competition for a transitional cup.
A team is formed of five persons of unrestricted age; both men and women can be involved. The judges record the time of carrying out different competition tasks and count points for additional tasks for each participant team. The winner teams are revealed by ranking all teams by their gross scores (summing up the individual times and scores earned for fully accomplished tasks).
One of the main aims of the ForestSport competition – to muster the community of foresters and forest lovers for free, active and open communication. We believe that this is of crucial importance in these times of strange societal alienation. Foresters and forest lovers were evermore communicative and distinctively creative at their work, workmanship, arts and social life; thus, on behalf of the ForestSport core team we wish for all to continue this old and right tradition of this nice communication and coming together – we shall forget all our troubles from time to time and stay happy at least till the feast ends! Let’s come and spend a good time together every year!
