Prague, Nov 29 (CTK) – The Czech state is going to spend millions of crowns on promoting its unique Baroque heritage as a tourist attraction to replace this year’s 700th anniversary of Bohemian King and Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, daily Lidove noviny (LN) wrote on Tuesday.
Czech Baroque, or “Baroque tasted with all senses” will be the main motif the state Czech Tourism agency will be promoting in 2017, the paper writes.
Czech Tourism has already chosen marketing firms to present the campaign at 13 tourism fairs abroad, including in Berlin, London, Moscow and Dubai. It has given them a total of 28 million crowns for this purpose, the paper writes.
Their task is to promote Baroque not only by means of videos, books and booklets, but also to offer refreshment that would be reminiscent of the Baroque era and attract the attention of foreign visitors.
Besides, Czech Tourism organised a tour of the most important Baroque sites for heads of its foreign branches and representatives of selected foreign travel agencies this summer.
The tour included visits to the Baroque hospital complex in Kuks, east Bohemia, which underwent a thorough reconstruction two years ago, the UNESCO-listed town of Cesky Krumlov, south Bohemia, and also Olomouc, the north Moravian town with its Holy Trinity column, a wonderful example of the Baroque architecture and another of the 12 Czech items on the UNESCO list of world cultural heritage.
A special issue of the Soffa magazine for tourism, devoted to Baroque, will appear in early December, as will a new map of Baroque sights, LN writes.
The creative part of the campaign will cost five million crowns, it writes.
Within the main campaign, smaller campaigns will promote Baroque architecture, music, landscape and other elements, the paper adds.
The overall costs of the project are yet to be definitively approved by the Regional Development Ministry, but they will be lower than the costs of this year’s promotion of the Charles IV anniversary, because the Baroque campaign is not linked to any special anniversary nor does it involve cross-border projects.
In addition, Czech Tourism must tackle the legacy of its former director, Rostislav Vondruska, who seems to have spent its money very ineffectively while in the post from 2004 to 2014, the daily writes, referring to a lawsuit the Supreme Audit Office (NKU) filed against Vondruska in May.
