Főnix Hall 4.5

Főnix Hall is a multi-purpose arena in Debrecen, Hungary. Fonix Hall holds 8,500 people and opened in 2002. It hosted the 2002 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships.The arena was named after the Phoenix, a mythical firebird which is the symbol of Debrecen.Főnix Hall is located in Debrecen, which is the second largest city of Hungary, in a pleasant environment: close to the Nagyerdő area, near Road 4, along the thoroughfare to Košice called Kassai út. Entering the building through the main entrance, one immediately find itself in the arena space. Along one of the longitudinal sides of the amphitheater, there are locker rooms and service facilities for the athletes, while the other side is actually a multifunctional area that can be freely divided with the help of relocatable partition walls. In the city, the demand had long been in the air for a state-of-the-art convention hall/arena with a larger than average seating capacity. The final impulse was provided by the possibility of acting as the host for the 2002 World Championship in Gymnastics. In fact, the plans for an already existing sports hall from the city of Tallinn (Estonia) were adapted to suit the local circumstances. The construction of Főnix Hall was completed in eight months.Since its inauguration, the hall has acted as the venue for a variety of events (such as ice hockey, indoor soccer, basketball and handball tournaments, hot air balloon and ballroom dancing championships, ballet performances, music concerts, various exhibitions, conferences and even ice shows). The long list of celebrities having performed here ranges from Olympic champion Szilveszter Csollány and the heavy metal band Iron Maiden or the rock band Deep Purple through the pianist Richard Clayderman to conductor Kobayashi Ken-Ichiro and singer Bryan Adams, including a number of other famous athletes and artists.