Subject: Athens Macedonian News Agency: News in English, 17-04-24 From: "HR-Net News Distribution Manager" CONTENTS [01] Kotzias: We can and should continue spreading the peaceful values of culture --------------------------------------------------------------------------- [01] Kotzias: We can and should continue spreading the peaceful values of culture Culture is soft power and an economic factor, Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias said on Monday at the closing press conference of the "Ancient Civilizations Forum" held in Athens. "Culture for us is soft power and an economic factor. It is what humanizes people and enables us to tell the untold in a way that dispels fears and insecurities […] we concluded that we can and must continue to work together to spread the peaceful values of culture and agreed in the next two months that there should be a number of plans and projects," he said speaking at Zappeion. "We prefer dialog to fanaticism, we prefer civilization to terrorist acts. We prefer to retrieve the wisdom of our peoples from the past and seal the future," he added. Following the end of the forum, the ten participating countries - Greece, Italy, China, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Peru, Bolivia and Mexico – renewed their meeting for 2018, agreeing to hold the second forum in Bolivia. The aims of the forum are to open it to new members and observers, invite representatives from UNESCO, the UN and other international organizations depending on the subject, record speeches in a book and create a network of specialists. The two-day event was an initiative of Kotzias who organized it together with his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi.