BRUSSELS DECLARATION

Municipality of Edirne, awarded as number one in Turkey with its Project of Historical Kirkpinar Oily Wrestling for Destinations of Excellence, is invited officially to the programme of European Tourism Days, which is the activity of OPEN DAYS programme organized in Brussels on October 6-9th, 2008. Isilay Yildirim, from the Bureau of EU and international relations, attended to the meeting as the representative of The Municipality.

The activity organized in Brussels by the Tourism Unit of Enterprise and Industry of European Commission aimed to facilitate the distribution of information concerned with the way of creation and presence of the EU financial agents composing the content of “The Agenda for a Sustainable and Competitive Tourism in Europe” and the usage of these agents by different tourism shareholders.

Aiming these targets, Commission organized OPEN DAYS constituting several conferences with different themes and continuing all day in partnership with DG REGIO and the Regional Committee on October 6-9th, 2008.

European Tourism Days, organized on October 7th, were consisted of presentations of three different themes. In the morning session, presentations relating with the regional based European fund opportunities were held under the main theme of European Funds for tourism shareholders, national agents, local authorities, entrepreneurs-especially micro scaled ones- and the other companions.

Afternoon session was constituted the main theme of network opportunities for tourism and consisted of two main subtitles: First subtitle was examined as European Network of Regions. At second subtitle, presentations were held under the name of the EDEN project and European Network of Destinations of Excellence.

After the closing session, 20 awarded destinations participated in EDEN Project committed to sign the Brussels Declaration for sustainability of the project successful.

With this declaration, the project of European Destinations of Excellence (EDEN) commencing in 2007 was transformed to an action plan. Awarded destinations in 2007 and 2008 within the project will be collaborate with each other through the web-portal and annual meetings will be organized by each destinations to sustain the project aims.