Adrian Cioroianu, director of the National Library of Romania, believes that National Culture Day should be celebrated every day of the year, not just on January 15, informs Agerpres.
"In my opinion, it is a very good idea to establish a National Culture Day, in the context in which culture remains, I believe, the main piece of identity in any society, including the Romanian society, and given that, from a financial point of view, culture has never been financially rewarded in our country - I am referring to its share of GDP. The fact remains, however, that the mere establishment of a National Culture Day, in a way, keeps the cultural officials on their toes and it is true that all over the country there are events that, many of them, are very successful and that, in a way, also become an example of best practices. Finally, the idea is that, in fact, we should not think about national culture only on January 15, but it is a good exercise, let's say, otherwise we should be attentive to national culture all year round, not only on National Culture Day," Adrian Cioroianu told AGERPRES.
He said that Romanians "are hungry for culture", despite some people's belief that there is a "modest cultural consumption".
"For Romanians, I believe that there really is a hunger for culture, despite our fear that there is a modest cultural consumption. I remain of the opinion that, on the contrary, there is a real expectation, but I believe that we should, in one way or another, adapt to other generations. When we think about culture, we go for a rather traditional variant of the book, of the library, of meeting writers to talk about their work. It would seem that the younger generation could have a different approach to the cultural phenomenon," he added.
The interest and appetite of young people are real, Cioroianu emphasizes, but we may fail to perceive the ways in which they expect the cultural act.
"I can give you two concrete examples. In my case, that TV series was much more successful than expected, and I'm referring to '5 minutes of history', to audiences that you would not have thought were passionate about history. And at the level of the National Library, which I have the pleasure of running now, there are a lot of requests from young people who are no longer willing to come to the library to look for a book, they ask for it in digital format, in other words, to read at home. Of course, you can't always serve them in this way, because the digitization of a work also means respecting copyright and many other details. But the demand exists, except that sometimes expectations are more or less wrong, but the demand exists. And the digitization of culture is a phenomenon from which we will not be able to escape. The younger generations are consuming more in digital and visual format than us, those who - let's say - grew up in libraries," said Adrian Cioroianu.
A series of events in which young people are invited to participate will take place at the National Library of Romania, on National Culture Day.
"We even have an event that we are really looking forward to, because we will have several hundred young students. It's a discussion on the movie 'The New Year That Never Was', with the idea of explaining to them, after all, what that film is about, because there are generations of young people who no longer know what the homage events meant or reciting verses about Ceausescu, the television program of that time, the censorship in television. They were born at a time when you could see anything on TV. And it is from this perspective that we propose the event tomorrow, January 15," said Adrian Cioroianu.
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