The Promised Land

2026 marks the end of lignite’s era, proclaimed in 2019. In these transitional times, the play takes us back to where it all started; the Marshall Plan and the beginning of the lignite expansion in the 1940s; the economic growth and DEI’s ‘monocultre’; the thousand jobs and the landscape’s radical transformation. And all the invisible sides to this story: the health implications, the work accidents, the environmental protests, and today’s uncertainty due to delignification leading the region towards a new, blurry future.

The Promised Land is the Municipal and Regional Theatre of Kozani’s new production for the summer of 2026, co-produced with Athens Epidaurus Festival. It is a theatrical play deeply connected to Western Macedonia’s identity and community, as well as the country’s little-known history of energy.

As Georgia Mavragani remarks: ‘Behind every power outage/blackout lie a thousand human lives that compose one of the most important chapters of modern Greece: that of electric power production from DEI and its pivotal role in the shaping of the social, economic, and environmental character of the region.’

The director, with a long experience in documentary theatre and in participation with communities, composes the work after an onsite research that lasted for months. Historical archives, journalistic sources, and the testimonies of inhabitants, workers, and officials become theatrical material. Onstage professional actors and members of the local community co-exist to bridge the documented with the lyrical, and the personal with the collective.

The Promised Land is part of DIPETHE Kozani’s strategic orientation which supports the production of contemporary works in creative conversation with the region’s history and related issues. The work’s presentation within the Festival’s context aspire to function as an act of collective cultural dialogue and self-awareness: as a direct and living testimony about energy, loss, and a transition that does not concern only a place or a geographical region, but the whole country and the people.