Athens, January 21st-23rd, 2020
Emil Constantinescu, President of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Levant Culture and Civilization, and Luiza Niță, IASLCC General Manager, participated at the XX High-Level Reunion organized by the “Nizami Ganjavi”International Center of Azerbaijan and the Marianna V. Vardinoyannis Foundation of Greece. This year’s edition was centered on a pressing matter of the international community – climate changes, as well as the less known impact they have on world cultural heritage.
The reunion was held under the Patronage of the President of the Hellenic Republic, Prokopios Pavlopoulos, who also delivered a speech in the opening session. The event reunited over 40 leaders and decision-makers of the Mediterranean area, as well as ministers and members of the Greek academic community. This reunion was itself a debate framework for topics such as: efforts to protect cultural heritage when confronted with negative effects of climate changes, the impact of climate changes on the Mediterranean, means and instruments on climate change management, the future of euro-atlantic integration and the challenges of 2020 in fields such as politics, business and society.
Within the larger framework of the reunion, on January 22, at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, a conference dedicated to the commemoration of 2500 years since the battles of Thermopylae and Salamis was held; the conference was entitled “The Many and the Few: Multitude and Virtue”. It was within this conference that President Emil Constantinescu delivered a speech, announcing the launching of a project destined to revive the cultural history of the Balkans. President Constantinescu highlighted the relevance of such a project for the area, explaining that ”In the current context of globalization and the removal of Western culture and civilization from its historical fundaments, such a project is not opposed to the western European culture, but on the contrary, it is an effort to return to its eastern roots to defend the values around which it was created”.
