2018 will mark the celebration of our diverse cultural heritage across Europe. The European Year of Cultural Heritage project aimsto encourage more people to discover and engage with Europe’s cultural heritage, and to reinforce a sense of belonging to a common European space. Their slogan:

Our heritage: where the past meets the future.

In the starting year of the initiative a series of initiatives and events across Europe will begin to develop, to enable people to become closer to and more involved with their cultural heritage. Cultural heritage shapes our identities and everyday lives. It surrounds us in Europe’s towns and cities, natural landscapes and archaeological sites. It is not only found in literature, art and objects, but also in the crafts we learn from our ancestors, the stories we tell to our children, the food we enjoy in company and the films we watch and recognise ourselves in.

Why Cultural Heritage?

Cultural heritage has a universal value for us as individuals, communities and societies. It is important to preserve and pass on to future generations. You may think of heritage as being ‘from the past’ or static, but it actually evolves though our engagement with it. What is more, our heritage has a big role to play in building the future of Europe. That is one reason why we want to reach out to young people in particular during the European Year.

Cultural heritage comes in many shapes and forms.

• tangible – for example buildings, monuments, artefacts, clothing, artwork, books, machines, historic towns, archaeological sites.
• intangible – practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – and the associated instruments, objects and cultural spaces – that people value. This includes language and oral traditions, performing arts, social practices and traditional craftsmanship.
• natural – landscapes, flora and fauna.
• digital – resources that were created in digital form (for example digital art or animation) or that have been digitalised as a way to preserve them (including text, images, video, records).

Through cherishing our cultural heritage, we can discover our diversity and start an inter-cultural conversation about what we have in common. So what better way to enrich our lives than by interacting with something so central to who we are?

Cultural heritage should not be left to decay, deterioration or destruction. This is why in 2018, we search for ways to celebrate and preserve it.

Most of the text was taken from the project introduction at http://europa.eu/cultural-heritage/node/2_en. Visit the site to read about what 2018 has in store in more detail, and remember to check back when the exciting feature of browsing their events by country will be live!