Many different cultures and religions have left a trace on Perperikon. They all, however, celebrated summer, associating it with growth and maturity and the abundance of life-sustaining vegetation. Thus, pagans and Christians alike worshiped the first day of summer, the day of the summer solstice (reckoned to be the 24th of June). For the Bulgars, it was the day of their chief deity, Tangra; the Slavs worshiped it as the day of sacred herbs and miraculous healing; and Christianity instituted the day of St. John the Baptist or Prodromus ('the Forerunner') or, in the Bulgarian apocryphal tradition, Enyov den (or One Day).

The week leading up to the June solstice is the time chosen for the Perperikon Art Festival, its last night, on the 22nd of June, the shortest night of the year, a night of magic according to popular belief. And the organisers' idea is to make it a night of midsummer revelry under the starlit sky, with dance and music to celebrate a millennial tradition rooted in the ancient Dionysia.

Indeed, the philosophy of the Festival is to bridge the gap between different periods and traditions. With the advent of globalism in the 21st century, the preservation of cultural diversity, an idea as exciting as it is relevant, finds its proper medium in theatre as the melting pot of various forms of artistic expression, ethnic traditions and ideologies. At the heart of the Balkans, on a crossroads between North and South, East and West, the Perperikon Art Festival was conceived and born as a celebration of European and Asian cultures, ancient and modern, in veneration of the past and in hope for the future.