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Archive - Archive 2004 - July 2013

Week of events to celebrate religious heritage |14 April 2008

The activities are part of a worldwide celebration of International Day for Monuments and Sites, on April 18, which this year Unesco has given the theme of religious heritage and sacred places.

The highlight of the week in Seychelles, organised by the National Heritage Research Section (NHRS), will be a monuments award presentation on Friday at the National Theatre.

Week-long activities will include an exhibition on our religious heritage and sacred places at La Bastille, a radio quiz, banners in town and cleaning of various historic sites.  

On Saturday there will be a site visit to Wennsikonm at Glacis, and on the same day the Nation will carry a feature article on our religious heritage.

The NHRS says the week will be an opportunity to raise public awareness of the diversity of Seychelles’ and the world’s heritage, to highlight the efforts that must be made to protect and preserve it and to draw attention to heritage sites at risk.

Seychellois are invited to join in celebrating and protecting our religious heritage and sacred places.
Dinu Bumbaru, the secretary general of the International Council on Monuments and Sites, says that religious practices and beliefs have led human societies to mark their spaces, build places, carry out works or build up archives loaded with meaning and memories, making it one of the most important components of the heritage in today’s world.

This theme expresses itself in landscapes through place names or rites and pilgrimages linked to certain natural elements, he adds. In creating this heritage, many past and present societies brought together the sum of all their arts and sciences in buildings that are often large but just as often quite modest.

At a time when religion is increasingly being recognised by the international community as one of the major issues for decades to come, the international day will be an occasion to take stock of the various dimensions of knowledge, conservation and presentation of this vast heritage.

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