Ark of Europe

The "Ark of Europe" is developed by Real Society Foundation (Romania) in partnership with Journalist Association "Balkan Forum" (Bulgaria) and Youth Forum Bitola (FYR Macedonia).

The project is financed by European Cultural Foundation, SOROS Foundation and Romanian National Administration of Cultural Fund


Project Summary
Each partner organization will identify in its own country a mixed community, with a relevant Turkish minority. The partners will embark in a four months long field work. They will identify four mixed ethnic families in order to find out their life stories.
Each life story will be sustained by a series of “visual witnesses” (photos of family members, objects) which reflect the image of the two cultures living together. Using the information gathered, each partner will produce a short film relevant for intercultural mixture.
In October 2010, a “work-show” will be organized. The “visual witnesses” will be exhibited and the short films will be presented and discussed by the partners, artists, anthropologists and sociologists.
The materials produced will be integrated into a Visual Caravan which will travel in each partner’s country.

Why the Turkish community?
The project is meant to identify the social memory for each community as the “social place” where values, norms and mechanisms of the cultural adaptation are kept. The project’s goal is to reconstruct the experience of “me and myself”, “you and yourself” and of “me and you, together” in the Southeastern Europe.
The project will be developed taking into consideration the following aspects:
-Human aspect:
*Turkish population: based on the official dates, in the Balkans there are approximatively 1.1 million Turks. If we are to believe the statements of the Turkish leaders from the region, the number is even bigger reaching 2 millions.
*Muslim population: besides Turks, in the Balkans, live the members of other Muslim communities who share the same history and Turkish culture. According to the official dates, they represent 12% (8.25 millions) of the total population in the region.
-Historical aspect:
the common historical experience of Turkey with the Balkan countries.
-Cultural aspect:
*Linguistic: in the vocabulary of the countries from the region the Turkish words represent a significant proportion.
*Patrimony: the existence in the region of some architectural edifices from the Ottoman State period.
*Habits and traditions:
-the perpetuation of Turkish cultural inheritance
-the adoption of local habits and traditions
This experience might be the bench-mark or at least the reflexive argument for the unitary construction of the European cultural identity.

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