World Heritage
Across all continents together, only 812 cultural and natural monuments, comparable to the Seven Wonders of the World of the ancient Greeks, are entitled to be marked by this emblem in the year 2005. All these wonders of our present world are entered in the UNESCO List of World Cultural and Natural Heritage and they alone have the right to use this emblem. The emblem serves to epitomize the interrelation of cultural and natural heritage. The square in the centre is a form which was created by man, whereas the circle represents Nature. Both forms are interconnected to suggest that culture does not exist outside Nature. The emblem is round like the Earth, at the same time, however, the circle comes to symblize protection. The list of World Cultural Heritage has been established and is supplemented every year in keeping with the Convention on the Protection of World Cultural heritage adopted in 1972 by the UNESCO General Conference. In this document, 180 countries, including the Czech Republic, have pledged, among other things, to protect the world’s most important cultural and natural assets in the interest of mankind as a whole, and to exert the utmost effort to preserve them, present them to the general public and, above all, to hand them down to future generations. After all the List of World Cultural Heritage contains the most valuable legacy bequeathed to mankind by previous generations. At the beginning of the year 2005, the Czech Republic could boast twelve cultural assets registered in this prestigious list of “the elite" of cultural monuments, i.e. one and a half per cent of the world cultural heritage. Considering the country’s size and rather dramatic history, this is quite an impressive number.
