Frédéric Mitterrand's Editorial
Minister of Culture and Communication
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of the minister in French
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Monuments conserved by passionate men and women, traces left in landscapes and minds by those who built them or inhabited them: for their 27th edition, European Heritage Days celebrate the great history of shared heritage through places which have been left with the mark of ‘great men.’
In choosing the theme ‘Great personalities: when men and women build history,’ I wanted to pay tribute to figures from our national or local history, who built our heritage brick by brick, a combination of volition, courage, creativity and individual commitment.
‘Time does not wipe away the trace of great men’: Euripides’ Andromache already held this intimate and fundamental conviction to which heritage holds testimony until this day. It retains the memory of men or women, artists, writers, political figures and builders, whose work has built the foundations of a building in the landscape and in time, that they were the inspired creators, the great visitors or loyal owners of it. Effectively heritage is enriched by the depth of its memory.
It is the desire, to make common destinies confront each other, to make man and the place converse, to value those who give their time and enthusiasm to preserve the traces of history that I wanted to place at the heart of European Heritage Days.
In particular I would like to thank public and private partners who as a whole, become involved each year and pay tribute to French heritage, and allow the ever growing success of these Days.
It is my wish that these 27th European Heritage Days give to each and every one of us the pleasure of discovering, admiring and sharing the unique patrimonial richness of our country, and that they allow us to always better inhabit these places of recollection, that we bring alive in the present and bestow in turn to future generations. It is also in this compatibility of time that we form our history.
Frédéric Mitterrand,
Minister of Culture and Communication
