Where the past Meets the Future

The year of 2018 has been announced as the European Year of Cultural Heritage. Throughout 2018, there are various celebrations of European diverse cultural heritage taking place across Europe. The year of Cultural Heritage has been dedicated to encourage more people across the European nations at a local, regional, national and international level to discover and engage with Europe's cultural heritage, and to reinforce a sense of belonging to a common European space. The slogan of the year and the name of the project is “Our heritage: where the past meets the future”.
European nations can be proud of their unique architecture, monumental buildings; long-lasting traditions, cultural customs and natural landscape as well as diverse flora and fauna. Although, European communities have a rich cultural heritage today's youth are often not aware of their own locality's special heritage and lack belonging to their own community.
The official European Cultural Heritage campaign has encouraged youth, communities and organizations across the European Union to experience, appreciate and enjoy their local cultural heritage this year. The participating youth of the project have committed and have a keen interest in contributing to the overall campaign and identify, explore, research and promote their locality's cultural heritage.
There are plenty of places across rural European areas that have been left behind and have not been identified and promoted at a local, national and European level, but have a very rich and interesting cultural heritage worth to be explored. The participating organizations of the project are groups of young people aged between 13 and 18 based in 6 rural areas across Europe.
The project focuses on mobilising youth of European rural areas, identify their locality's special cultural heritage that comes in many different forms (e.g. tangible, intangible, natural) and explore, do the necessary research to learn more and generate innovative ways to promote their own locality's cultural heritage.
The project perfectly aligns with the programme of the Erasmus+ as it is mainly focusing on developing competences of youth; ensure the local youth are aware of their cultural heritage, that is one of the priorities of the European Year of Cultural Heritage. Also, the project provides an opportunity to youth with fewer opportunities from rural/remote areas and from low-income families to discover new cultures and habits of other European countries. The project aims at encouraging the local youth to cherish their own cultural heritage, discover diversity of the rich European heritage and participate in an inter-cultural dialogue with like-minded youth from other regions of Europe.