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Application form CLUJ-NAPOCA CANDIDATE CITY FOR EUROPEAN CAPITAL OF CULTURE 2021 East of West Cluj-Napoca embarked on the process leading to the European Capital of Culture application five years ago. It has been a complex and rewarding process. We are opening towards ourselves and towards Europe. We invite artists and people across Europe to join us in an urban laboratory where our experiments and small- scale innovations are taken to a next level. The one where cultural vitality provides the grounds for a fulfilling life for all. Where public sphere is imagined and built through participation. A level where our assets - academic and artistic excellence, social innovation, a young population, a diverse culture and a vital economy - can be catalysed, through culture, to be a model for European urban living. Culture is our mean to heal, to connect and to grow. As a community, as a city, as Europe. Emil Boc MAYOR OF CLUJ-NAPOCA CITY Introduction – General considerations 3 Introduction 0.1 Why does your city wish to take part in the competition for the title of European Capital of Culture? Table of contents Cluj-Napoca has always been considered “the heart of Today we feel that our city is awakening, The community Transylvania” and, for the last 100 years, has also been one is more and more alive. We do not know if the past will not of the most important cities in Romania. We, its inhabitants, return, but we are determined to carry on. are multicultural not by choice, but - as in many other parts in Europe - by destiny. We have managed it, often visionary We look at ourselves with pride, but we also scrutinize each and courageous, under the pressures, dramas and tragedies other with fear - we don’t know yet whether we have fully of history. From the perspective of cohabitation - although succeeded. challenged by different, sometimes dramatic regimes and changes of ideology - the century spanning from 1918 to the What has united us, so far, is competing for the European Introduction – General considerations 3 present day is one of permanent and assiduous balancing. Capital of Culture title. It is the first challenge that we take on together and this helped us to get to know each other If you get close to the “soul of the city” you immediately better. Winning the title would be our first victory together 1. Contribution to the long-term strategy 10 discover that there is a Cluj of the Romanians, a Cluj of the which would confirm that we are a Europe in miniature, in the Hungarians, one of the Germans, one of the Roma, and one process of defining and reconstructing its identity. of the Jews; a Cluj of the elders and one of the youth; a Cluj 2. European dimension 21 of the students and one of the workers; a Cluj of the women We acknowledge that our process of identity reconstruction and one of the men; a Cluj of the central zone and one of is European and that the process of European identity the outskirts. Each of these communities builds up a tower reconstruction is ours, too. Acknowledging that big is small 3. Cultural and artistic content 31 of love for the city, ignoring the others, so that our Citadel is and small is big creates a place of osmosis, of mutual also a juxtaposition - sometimes litigious - of monuments of learning, of synergy, common experience, common memory. It belonging. creates a common vision of the future. 4. Capacity to deliver 45 Soon after 1989 we have discovered that the Romanian Examining ourselves in the mirror of the past and of the Revolution, though it liberated us from Communism, has not present, but thinking of our future incessantly, we have 5. Outreach 53 made us really free. We started seeking freedom, each on our realized that our common history is based on a genuine art own, ignoring that what we had to build was a collective of living together. We, Cluj-Napoca inhabitants, want to study freedom, a free community. We allowed ourselves to be this art thoroughly, to define it, to grasp and improve its acts, 6. Management 61 pushed into a competition for occupying the symbolic places, so that it might become a model - for us to keep and for into fear of the Other. Instead of a community, we have built a others to follow. For Europe, too. federation of communities. We want to further this model of coexistence. We woke up We are a candidate city for the European Capital of Culture and we do not want to fall back into our suspicion-induced title because we want to transform this federation into a sleep. And the European Capital of Culture title can be our “union” of Cluj-Napoca communities. pledge. Ten years ago, a sociological analysis identifiedmistrust “Among human beings, if you annul the Other, you annul Additional information 79 as the virus that dismantled collective solidarity in Cluj- yourself”. (Constantin Noica – Romanian philosopher) Napoca. After 1990, each of the numerous groups built on vanity, instead of putting together a real community, has Out of respect for difference, we keep on emphasizing confirmed the diagnosis:our city was dead. A city in which what divided us, but we have found out together that these politeness took the place of genuine human relations and in differences may engender unexpected harmonies, beneficial which, perhaps, only rascals were capable of working together. for everybody. We wish to find balance, to avoid uniformity as Our indifference has killed this wonderful Transylvanian city. a risk of losing identity. In the last decade, our way of thinking has undergone a We want to become a community of equals. significant transformation. Citizens have felt that the city is falling out of step with history and is isolating itself. Introduction – General considerations 5 The time has come to be bold together! all recognize because it addresses the Human; that is why it has been assimilated naturally, as one of the long-term Founded as a Roman colony in the 2nd century A.D., ransacked strategic priorities of the city. by the Tatar invasion of the 13th, sieged and conquered in the 15th, burned to the ground in the 17th and stricken by the With its international resonance and network of activities, plague one hundred years later, our city was constantly reborn the title of European Capital of Culture is not a mere chance, and remodelled due to very diverse populations. They each but a rare opportunity to activate our cultural potential and added their own bricks to the visible and invisible walls of mobilize the entire community. For the first time in recent the city. history, all political parties in the city have joined hands in a common project. This one. For the first time, due to Today, alongside the Romanian majority, the Hungarian this candidature, the representatives of different religious ethnics represent 15,8% of the city’s population, but there denominations might pray together. More than 300 cultural are also significant Roma, German and Jewish communities. In operators have contributed to the elaboration of the long- the city centre, within a one kilometre radius, there soar the term strategy of the municipality. churches and cathedrals spires of six Christian denominations (Orthodox, Greek-Catholic, Roman-Catholic, Reformed, The concept of our application, East of West, speaks Unitarian and Lutheran), plus a synagogue. This is unique in about this rediscovery of self and the awakening of a new Europe. consciousness. About the bridges that you can build towards the others. History sends us a paradoxical message: the name Our diversity is an infinite source of positive energy. These of Cluj comes from the Latin [Castrum] clus, which means communities - separated by language, religion, wealth or “closed space”, but the historical symbol of the city is a raised education - are learning, through the agency of culture, how fortress gate. We want to show foreigners, friends and all those interested, openness to the world of the tens of thousands of young to communicate and understand one another. what the struggle of a community that wants to rediscover people studying here, an extra chance of maintaining a well- We desire to be a European Capital of Culture to open itself means. balanced, optimistic atmosphere. It is through them that the We think the time has come to tell Europe our story, so that, ourselves not only outwards, by welcoming the foreigners city is always young and has bold plans and projects for the together, we might find new solutions. For us, for Europe and who visit us, but also inwards, towards ourselves, to be able In the past, Cluj-Napoca was known as the treasure-city of future. together with Europe. to tell Europe what we have learned about one another, for Transylvania. Today we all believe that, in fact, it is the people Europe to see itself reflected in our diversity. who are the great treasure. But the status of being a secular university city alone does Culture is the most powerful story we can tell together. not resolve our problem of integrating tens of thousands of Although differently understood, culture is the value that we This is our vision. We want to tell Europe our story, from which we all can learn, Romanian and foreign students who study and live in our because it is a story about the European construction. About community. Despite their love for Cluj-Napoca, many young people who are rebuilding the city from their souls, tearing people are obliged to look elsewhere for their future.

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