Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 02/07/2026 23:44:00

Seven towers of orientalist fantasy rise from the middle of Malmo's Folkets Park, built by the labour movement for workers who were not welcome in the bourgeois salons. Moriska Paviljongen - Moriskan to the city - was commissioned in 1901, when the Social Democrats who had bought the park a decade earlier decided their members deserved entertainment as well as politics. Polish-Jewish architect Aron Wolff Krenzisky answered with an orientalist fairy-tale palace, unique in Sweden, inaugurated on 17 August 1902 as the Moriska Restaurationen. The house has lived several lives since. Its dance-palace heyday peaked in the mid-century decades - 1947 alone counted over 130,000 visitors to the park's dance evenings - and generations of Swedish revue and krogshow names played the room, from Galenskaparna and After Shave to After Dark. Decades of decline followed until a comprehensive renovation brought the pavilion back to life on 16 June 2011, under the cultural operator Re:Orient, with a mission that matches the building's origin: a meeting place showing the power and joy of a mixed Malmo. Today four stages, bars and a French-Moroccan bistro fill the house with club nights, concerts, stand-up, theatre, dance evenings and performing arts, both in-house and with external arrangers, plus conferences and private events. From May to September the Mikkeller-run garden opens as one of Malmo's largest outdoor serving areas, family-friendly under the park's trees. The pavilion stands at Norra Parkgatan on the park's northern edge, a short walk from Mollevangstorget and its late-night streets. Folkets Park around it claims the title of the world's oldest people's park, bought by the labour movement in 1891, and the pavilion shares its grounds with the funfair rides, the Far i Hatten restaurant and the functionalist dance palace Amiralen from 1939 - a full century of Swedish popular culture within one park fence.