The ministry has new programs for monuments and scholarships for artists

Prague - The Ministry of Culture has announced two new heritage programs and one scholarship program for artists. One heritage program is intended for municipalities with extended competencies, and this year approximately 200 million Czech crowns should be allocated to it. The second program aims to support UNESCO-listed heritage sites and will allocate 18 million crowns for this year, said ministry spokesperson Marcela Žižková to ČTK. The funding for the programs each year will always depend on the budget, she added.
    Approximately eight million crowns will go to scholarships from the office's budget. This program is intended to support authors or performing artists in the creation and production of original works and artistic performances. The deadlines for this year's application submissions are March 15 and June 30.
    The heritage program for municipalities with extended competencies is designed to assist that part of heritage sites that cannot access other forms of state support. The funds from this program should go to owners of heritage sites that are outside of heritage reserves and zones, are not national cultural monuments, and are not owned by the state.
    The owner must cover at least ten percent of the costs for which they are applying for a subsidy. However, funding from this program cannot overlap with another subsidy from a different ministerial heritage program.
    The UNESCO heritage program pertains to heritage sites already listed in the Czech Republic, those for which the ministry has submitted a nomination proposal, or has decided to process nomination documentation. Municipalities, individuals, and civic associations can apply for grants, receiving a maximum of 70 percent of the total intended project costs. In this program, a grant recipient may apply for funding for a heritage site affected in one year from other programs of the ministry.
    Last year, the six existing heritage programs, along with expenditures for flood damage repair from 2002 and expenditures for the protection of movable monuments, were funded with 720 million crowns; this year, this amount is increasing to 735 million and an additional 218 million crowns will be added. Thus, this year's Ministry of Culture budget allocates almost 953 million for heritage. The overall budget is 8.8 billion, of which 1.3 billion is for the work of churches, leaving 7.5 billion for culture. Heritage should thus receive about 12 percent of the entire budget.
    Cultural services and support for live art this year amount to just under 650 million. However, the largest share, nearly two-thirds of the funds after deducting expenditures on churches, still goes to contributory organizations (4.8 billion).
    The largest volume of money within the heritage programs goes to the Program for the Regeneration of Urban Heritage Reserves and Zones and the Program for the Rescue of Architectural Heritage. After the flow of funds into these programs was highly criticized about two years ago, approximately one-third more has been allocated to them last year and this year.
    Besides the amount of money, experts consider an important aspect of these programs to be the fact that they primarily motivate owners of cultural heritage to repair their properties more. This is mainly because the support is directed directly to the owner of the heritage site, and the restoration funds come from three sources - the state, the city or municipality, and the heritage site owner.