In Timisoara on Friday, Culture Minister Daniel Breaz said the Timisoara European Capital of Culture 2021 project is highly important to Romania, with the Romanian government having recently budgeted almost 52 million lei for the events that the Timisoara ECC 2021 will organise throughout 2022.
"This is a highly important project to Romania. Sibiu - a European capital of culture [in 2007], played a secondary role, but now Romania plays the lead role; so the approval for Timisoara ECC 2021 is extremely important to Romania. We have become aware of this and speeded up things structurally so that at the level of the Government of Romania, we may have the necessary functional pieces of legislation and can run the Timisoara European Capital of Culture projects (...) At this stage, the financial contribution of the Government of Romania will be of almost 53 million lei," Minister Breaz said.
He underlined that the main part of this European capital of culture is to highlight all the strengths of the city that can bring it into a select European cultural club.
Breaz assured that Timisoara will have all the support of the government for these activities, as it is equally a national and a local project.
"The government has so far accomplished everything it pledged to do at the time of submitting the application for this title (...) The schedule of events will be proposed by the Timisoara ECC 2021 Association, which the government will finance. It is not the government to ask for a certain schedule of events. It will be multiannual funding until 2022," the minister said.
Senior official with the Culture Ministry Ion Ardeal Ieremia said in his turn that the funding is annual, and the sums that are not spent in one year are not lost, but they can be spent the following year.
"The financing procedure is changing and there will be no longer the requirements that delayed funding in the past years. The association is no longer obliged to give us [the gov't] a schedule of events, according to the new ordinance. The schedule is set up by the association. The funding is multiannual, with the possibility of unspent funds being carried over from one year to another," the official said.
