Hermann Parzinger receives "Order of Friendship" of the Russian Federation
Press release from 11/04/2009
Hermann Parzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, was presented with the "Order of Friendship" by Russian President Medvedev at a ceremony in the Kremlin in Moscow today. This highest Russian honour for foreign citizens was awarded to him in recognition of his outstanding scientific achievements and his wide-ranging commitment to German-Russian scientific and cultural relations, which have regularly taken him to Russia for decades.
Hermann Parzinger explains: "It is a special honour for me to receive this award. It is also an incentive for me to continue working at the academic level and as President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation to intensify exchange and cooperation with Russia."
Hermann Parzinger was the founding director of the newly created Eurasia Department of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) in Berlin from 1995 to 2003, built up scientific relations with Russia and other successor states of the former Soviet Union in the field of archaeology and led several successful excavation projects in the Russian Federation. For example, he led the German-Russian expedition that discovered the untouched grave of a Scythian prince from the 7th century BC with 5,600 gold objects in Aržan in the southern Siberian Republic of Tuva in July 2001, and in the summer of 2006, together with Russian and Mongolian colleagues, he discovered the ice mummy of another Scythian cavalry warrior in the Mongolian part of the Altaj Mountains. Among his numerous publications on the archaeology of Eurasia, his comprehensive handbook "The Early Peoples of Eurasia", published in 2006, is particularly noteworthy. He became known to a wider public during his term as president of the DAI (2003-2008) when he organised the exhibition "Im Zeichen des goldenen Greifen. Royal Tombs of the Scythians" exhibition. The fifty-year-old is also an honorary doctor and holder of the Silver Medal of Honour of the Siberian Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk (since 2001), an honorary doctor of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow (since 2004) and holder of the Medal of Honour of the Republic of Tuva for services to the advancement of science (2007).
Parzinger has been President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation since March 2008 and, in this office too, maintains a wide range of relationships with experts in the Russian Federation. For example, he is the spokesman for the German-Russian Museum Dialogue, which has been strengthening the exchange between German and Russian museum colleagues since 2005 and contributing to the clarification of cultural assets that were exiled as a result of the war. The initiatives are many and varied: a scholarship programme for museum curators, a project for the joint evaluation of transport lists by scientists from both countries in order to clarify the existence and condition of collections relocated as a result of the war and a joint exhibition on the Bronze Age (2011/12) in Europe. Hermann Parzinger also supports the German-Russian Library Initiative, which was agreed in Moscow in September 2009 by libraries from both countries and is coordinated on the German side by the Berlin State Library. Finally, together with Russian museums and research institutions, the SPK is planning a cultural-historical exhibition on the subject of "Germans and Russians. 1000 years together", which is to be shown in both countries.