The EMYA 2024 Annual Conference and Awards Ceremony took place in Portimão, Portugal from 1 to 4 May 2024. As a European Museum Forum board member and the Chair of the EMYA Jury for selecting the European Museum of the Year, the director of the WCM in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Amina Krvavac, attended the conference and ceremony.
“This past week has been a whirlwind of insightful conversations and reflective moments with colleagues from 28 countries across the continent. We delved into the power and potential of museums to respond to the pressing needs of contemporary society,”, stated Director Krvavac.
Also, she expressed her gratitude for the privilege of being part of the fantastic team that runs EMYA annual program—the longest and most prestigious award scheme in the European museum sector.
“It was such an honor to personally hand over the European Museum of the Year Award to this year’s winner SÁMI MUSEUM SIIDA in Finland, for demonstrating excellence and exemplary approach to fostering cultural dialogue and bridging cultures through ethical restitutions and reparations in culture and heritage,” concluded Krvavac.
Since its establishment in 1977, the European Museum Forum has annually awarded the Council of Europe Museum Prize to a museum recognized for its significant contribution to the understanding of European cultural heritage. This award acknowledges the excellence demonstrated by winning museums in their approach to museum work.”
We would like to remind you that the War Childhood Museum was honored with the 2018 Council of Europe Museum Prize, recognized as one of the most prestigious awards in the museum industry. A judging panel of 13 experts, each from a different European country, awarded the WCM the CoE Museum of the Year out of 40 finalists from 22 countries.
“The War Childhood Museum, which is deliberately apolitical, aims to fill in an existing gap in documenting war experiences from the child’s perspective and therefore expands its research and collection across Bosnia and Herzegovina, among diaspora living abroad and also globally. The judging panel praised the museum’s real potential to serve as a powerful self-sustained model of civic initiative and said it offered an example that could be replicated in other major conflict and post-conflict zones in the world,” stated the jury in 2018.
