Prague, Dec 21 (CTK) – The Czech-German Fund for the Future will support 169 projects with 34.4 million crowns in total, its administrative council decided yesterday, the fund’s spokeswoman Silja Schultheis told CTK.
The finances will mostly go to Czech-German culture projects and to reconstruction of churches and other buildings in the border regions.
Along with Prague’s Goethe Institute and the German Embassy, the Fund has offered subsidies to culture projects on occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Czech-German Declaration on the mutual relations and their future development that was signed in January 1997. The fund was established in 1997, several months after the signing, as one of the results of the declaration.
The administrative council co-chairwoman Kristina Larischova said these special subsidies want to motivate cultural representatives from both countries to organise joint new, innovative and creative cultural projects of various genres.
A Brno culture festival remembering the co-existence of Czechs, Germans and Jews will receive a subsidy of one million crowns. A Czech-German culture festival in Bremen will get 25,000 euros (675,000 crowns) and the same sum will go to a theatre festival that will be held in Olomouc. The Prague exhibition of contemporary German artist Eberhard Havekost will be subsidies with 420,000 crowns.
The Fund gave half a million crowns for the reconstruction of the Church of St Simon and Jude in Rozmital na Sumave, close to the Austrian border.
Originally, the Czech-German Fund for the Future was to function for ten years, but the two governments decided in 2007 to continue supporting neighbourly relations.
From 1995 to 2015, the fund provided a total of some 50 million euros for more than 9000 projects.
($1=26.068 crowns)
