Heads Of National Libraries In Southeast European Countries Meet In Ankara

ANKARA - Heads of national libraries in Southeast European countries met in Ankara on Wednesday to discuss preservation of cultural heritage.
Besides National Library Chairman Tuncel Acar, heads of national libraries in Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Serbia-Montenegro attended the meeting hosted by Turkish National Library.
Addressing opening remarks, Acar said that they would discuss ways to preserve common cultural heritage of humanity like monuments, constructions, sites, written and published works, statues, and paintings and how to transfer them to forthcoming generations, problems faced in preservation of cultural heritage, ways of solution and functions and contributions of national libraries to this process.
Drawing attention that cultural heritage was of great importance for societies, Acar said that national libraries undertook important duties to preserve cultural heritage and transfer it to forthcoming generations.
Acar added, ''recent cultural erosion in the world has once more revealed importance of preservation of cultural heritage.''
Bulgarian National Library Chairperson Boryana Hristova said that Ottoman Turkish had an important place in political, economic and social structure of Bulgaria.
Hristova noted that they had an original archive which was comprised of three thousand works written in Ottoman, Arabic and Persian.
Relations among countries were of vital importance for evaluation of those original pieces, Hristova emphasized.
Enes Kujundzic, the Chairman of National Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina, recalled that Bosnia-Herzegovina was a sight of a big war in previous years.
Kujundzic said that this meeting was an opportunity to restore demolished cultural heritage and lost historical heritage.
Heads of other national libraries who attended the meeting explained the efforts in their countries aiming at preservation of cultural heritage.
(BRC-AY) 19.11.2003