“Let us make Serbian heritage visible. Let us visit our monasteries in Kosovo and Metohija at least once a year”
On the occasion of the self-proclaimed state of Kosovo’s demands for the UNESCO membership, His Royal Highness Crown Prince Alexander gave the following statement:
“We fought that Serbia take a prominent place in one of the most important world organizations, UNESCO. And for that I am grateful to all the responsible people in our culture and in the world. And again, for the second time in five years we have to defend our centuries-old heritage of the hypocrisy of politics.
Five years ago, we made it. We prevented renaming the Serbian heritage in the list of protected cultural heritage. We did it because rather than politics, we defend the indisputable principle that the name of civilization heritage to be protected must remain under the name under which it was inscribed on the UNESCO list.
I want you to know that my family and I, aided by the advisory bodies of the Crown for months have been doing everything in our power to prevent the adoption of the proposed decision by the General Conference of UNESCO next week. We are not doing that because almost all Serbian heritage in Kosovo and Metohija is the legacy of Serbian kings, but because it is the legacy that has been endangered as the civilizational heritage for decades, even without the international political power games.
And I hope that we, all together, are going to make it this time, too. But I have to say that it will not be enough. And it will not be permanent if here in Serbia we treat our heritage with political hypocrisy, dividing it to the church and royal, our own and other people’s.
To begin with, no matter how difficult, and my family and I have experienced this many times, please let us make our heritage alive. Let us make it visible. Let us, at least once a year, visit our monasteries in Kosovo and Metohija.