We live in a stormy and disturbing time of radical changes in all spheres of life of the society. Although painfully the humanity tries to give answers to avalanche like advancing questions which provoke its creative maturity. Many of them overstep the bounds of intellectual challenge and affect still more definitely its own survival. It fully appears that we are in the dynamic course of a radical civilizing transition with a far unnotified end. What will be our choice to a new upsurge and decline depends only on the ability of the mankind, divided by numerous national, ethno-cultural, religious, economic and purely psychological barriers, to begin a new life together in the harmony of its diversity. Only preserving all the creative and intransient, laid in the foundation of the historical progress, only harmonically binding the riches of all circles of the civilization in a new universal philosophy, it could open up and defend the true way
This transition poses its alarming questions before the Slav peoples, too. Their centuries-old culture is one of the main streams of the contemporary civilization. Its springs, bursting forth from the highest summits of the scientific thought, art work and technical progress, already two millenniums have been feeding up the creative daring of the human race, its unquenchable thirst for knowledge and dreams for a just and harmonious world.
On their rough historical road the Slav peoples have had knowledge of both the glory of the progress and the tragedy of the slavery and destruction. However, they have never lost the core of their steadiness - the spiritual life. Just in its intransient illumination are hidden the roots and admiration of the Slavs before the freedom and justice and their unchanging complicity towards progress. This is also to explain why, since the moment when Cyrill and Methodious compiled and disseminated the Slavonic writing, their ideas for equality in the framework of a universal culture, open for complicity, have marked a civilizing maturity in the “old continent”. Here is hidden also the reason for the two brothers to be also canonized by the Catholic Church as “spiritual patrons of Europe”. .
ll this gives serious reasons to say that the Slav peoples will manage also today, in the new millennium, to give answers on merits to such complicated questions as:
What is the place of the Slavonic cultures in this process? What will they weave into it from their intellectual inheritance? In what manner will they defend their presence as one of the ferments for the qualitatively new stage of the spiritual maturity? What will be the specific contribution of the Slav peoples to the unity of democratic Europe and more security and justice in the world of 21st century?
However, to rely on an “automation” in the successful taking this school-leaving examination of history would be at least frivolous. Therefore, the Slav peoples need again a spiritual unity in the conceptional giving a meaning to the transition and creative diffusion of ideas and effort for clarifying the right answers. But together with this, if taking into consideration the trends to unification of the civilization, their new cultural mutuality imposes also a new opening to the other ethno-cultural communities. It requires an efficient negation of all that reproduces imperial ambitions and sponge on the ideological opening of our the more interdependent, the more multiform world.
All this gives a meaning to the existence and active national and international activities of the Slavyani Foundation. Not in the least overestimating the potentialities of such a cultural institution, its management is deeply convinced that only the civil and public stand of the Bulgarian intellectuals can ensure the right answers for a bright national future. Only with the participation of non-governmental structures of the civil society can be ensured the necessary trust and efficient spiritual complicity among the Slav peoples in Europe and the world as a whole. Therefore, the Slavyani Foundation strives through its numerous initiatives and programs to prove itself as one of the bridges among the national cultures. It strives to give our own, Bulgarian contribution to a new civilized way of the human coexistence on the planet Earth.
Prof. Dr.
Zahari Zahariev
President of the Slavyani Foundation
This transition poses its alarming questions before the Slav peoples, too. Their centuries-old culture is one of the main streams of the contemporary civilization. Its springs, bursting forth from the highest summits of the scientific thought, art work and technical progress, already two millenniums have been feeding up the creative daring of the human race, its unquenchable thirst for knowledge and dreams for a just and harmonious world.
On their rough historical road the Slav peoples have had knowledge of both the glory of the progress and the tragedy of the slavery and destruction. However, they have never lost the core of their steadiness - the spiritual life. Just in its intransient illumination are hidden the roots and admiration of the Slavs before the freedom and justice and their unchanging complicity towards progress. This is also to explain why, since the moment when Cyrill and Methodious compiled and disseminated the Slavonic writing, their ideas for equality in the framework of a universal culture, open for complicity, have marked a civilizing maturity in the “old continent”. Here is hidden also the reason for the two brothers to be also canonized by the Catholic Church as “spiritual patrons of Europe”. .
ll this gives serious reasons to say that the Slav peoples will manage also today, in the new millennium, to give answers on merits to such complicated questions as:
What is the place of the Slavonic cultures in this process? What will they weave into it from their intellectual inheritance? In what manner will they defend their presence as one of the ferments for the qualitatively new stage of the spiritual maturity? What will be the specific contribution of the Slav peoples to the unity of democratic Europe and more security and justice in the world of 21st century?
However, to rely on an “automation” in the successful taking this school-leaving examination of history would be at least frivolous. Therefore, the Slav peoples need again a spiritual unity in the conceptional giving a meaning to the transition and creative diffusion of ideas and effort for clarifying the right answers. But together with this, if taking into consideration the trends to unification of the civilization, their new cultural mutuality imposes also a new opening to the other ethno-cultural communities. It requires an efficient negation of all that reproduces imperial ambitions and sponge on the ideological opening of our the more interdependent, the more multiform world.
All this gives a meaning to the existence and active national and international activities of the Slavyani Foundation. Not in the least overestimating the potentialities of such a cultural institution, its management is deeply convinced that only the civil and public stand of the Bulgarian intellectuals can ensure the right answers for a bright national future. Only with the participation of non-governmental structures of the civil society can be ensured the necessary trust and efficient spiritual complicity among the Slav peoples in Europe and the world as a whole. Therefore, the Slavyani Foundation strives through its numerous initiatives and programs to prove itself as one of the bridges among the national cultures. It strives to give our own, Bulgarian contribution to a new civilized way of the human coexistence on the planet Earth.
Prof. Dr.
Zahari Zahariev
President of the Slavyani Foundation
Връзки
