At exactly noon on Friday 17 May 2013, downtown Ljubljana was the venue of the 13th Matura graduation parade, the biggest synchronised dance in the world.

The Matura Parade is a quadrille that Slovene high school graduates have been dancing on Slovenian streets since 2001, and has recently spread into neighbouring countries, and is the biggest synchronised dance in the world. Altogether in the last 12 years, almost 250,000 graduating pupils have danced in over a hundred European cities and Slovenia now holds seven Guinness World Records. The first Guinness record was broken in 2002.

The Matura Parade is danced every year to music from Johann Strauss’ operetta Die Fledermaus.
Prior to this year’s event, the organisers had expected that with synchronised dances comprising tens of thousands of young people going on in more than fifty towns and cities in Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania and the Ukraine, they were going to be able to break the current Guinness World Record of 33,202 simultaneous dancers, but this year some bad weather kept some participants away, meaning the record survived intact, but the fun had by all in the dancing and socialising was in no way reduced.