Building on world heritage
Press release from 04/16/2007
From 11 - 13 April 2007, under the chairmanship of Mikhail Gorbachev and Dr. h.c. Lothar de Maizière, the German-Russian Steering Committee of the Petersburg Dialogue met in Kaliningrad (Königsberg).
The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation Berlin and the Hermitage Museum St. Petersburg decided to organise a joint World Heritage Conference on the preservation and future-oriented development of outstanding architectural monuments. The focus is on Museum Island and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg as well as selected palace and garden complexes such as Peterhof and the Potsdam Palaces and Gardens.
The first conference will take place in St. Petersburg in November 2007, the second in Berlin in September 2008. Both conferences are open to a broad critical audience in the sense of promoting open civic discourse. World Heritage Sites offer enormous opportunities for development, but also entail extraordinary demands and special responsibilities.
Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, sees the exciting and mutually influential history as a fruitful exchange in the development of the architectural heritage and a central interest of our modern society.