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U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Office of the Spokesman
For Immediate Release August 29, 2005
2005/817
Media Note

Ambassador's Fund for Cultural Preservation Awards for 2005 Support Cultural Preservation in 76 Countries

The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State, is pleased to announce that the 2005 Ambassador's Fund for Cultural Preservation awards will support 87 cultural preservation projects in 76 countries. Established by Congress in 2001, the Ambassador's Fund forCultural Preservation aims to assist less developed countries in preserving museum collections, ancient and historic sites and traditional forms of expression. Since its inception, the program has awarded 292 grants in 106 countries. This year, the funding level was raised to $2.5 million.

U.S. Ambassadors in 100 of the 120 eligible countries in the developing world responded overwhelmingly to the call for project proposals, submitting 156 projects for consideration. The 2005 projects represent the heritage of all geographic regions and vary from archive preservation to museum collections, historic building restoration, and ethnographic documentation.

Projects include:
* The preservation of rock art sites in Honduras, Kenya, and Namibia;
* A comprehensive survey and restoration program for the historic center of Kabul, Afghanistan;
* The restoration of a former GULAG camp in Perm, Russia, just west of the Ural Mountains;
* The preservation of two important Islamic monuments, the Ak-Saray-Ding Tower and the Sultan Takesh Mausoleum in Kunya Urgench, Turkemenistan, a site recently inscribed on the World Heritage List;
* Assistance in the post-Tsunami efforts through the restoration of Omo-Hada type houses on the Indonesian island of Nias;
* A post-Tsunami survey of buildings in the 13th century coastal town of Matara, Sri Lanka;
* Preservation of historic documents including South Arabian texts inscribed on wood in Yemen, and in Kosovo, a manuscript collection dating from the Ottoman Empire.

The Ambassador's Fund for Cultural Preservation is administered by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Through a range of cultural preservation activities, the Bureau promotes cooperation with other countries to reduce the threat of pillage of irreplaceable cultural heritage, and to develop long-term strategies for preserving cultural property.

For more information on the Ambassador's Fund for Cultural Preservation, as well as a complete list of funded projects for 2005, please visit http://exchanges.state.gov/culprop/afcp/.

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