The values found in the historical Polish-Hungarian friendship are needed in the increasingly fragmented European Union value system, Polish Minister of Education and Science Przemyslaw Czarnek said in Warsaw on Wednesday.
The Ministry of Education in Warsaw announced the results of the Polish-Hungary - A Story of Friendship, a national academic competition organized for the second time this year.
Przemyslaw Czarnek underlined that it is also important for the future to find the elements in the common history that connected and still connect the two nations.
"And the future is not easy, we know what kind of historical moment we are in, what problems accompany it," the minister continued, referring to the conditions within the European Union (EU), the "more and more divergent value system". Today, Western and Central Eastern Europe "represent a completely different world of values", Czarnek stated, adding that these "difficult relations" will also be felt because Poland and Hungary "belonged to the EU, belong to it and will continue to do so in the future he wants to belong there". This is why we need the values that we find in our common history, in the centuries-old history of Polish-Hungarian friendship, in our bilateral relations - emphasized Czarnek.
He noted that difficulties also arise in connection with the war in Ukraine, because "in some respects, our relations run into various, albeit surmountable, obstacles on a daily basis." But in the future
"we can do everything if we understand the past, that Poland and Hungary are friendly countries."
Czarnek called on those present to preserve, nurture and build this friendship.
Hungarian Ambassador Orsolya Zsuzsanna Kovács
Maciej Szymanowski, the director of the Waclaw Felczak Polish-Hungarian Cooperation Institute in Warsaw, which organized the competition in Poland, said that more than two thousand students from 320 schools - from all Polish Voivodeships - participated in the three-round competition this year. The theme of this year's competition was three symbolic personalities of the common history: Saint Kinga of Árpád-háza , István Báthory , prince of Transylvania, and Józef Bem (József Bem), the Polish general of the 1848-49 Hungarian War of Independence, the commander of the Transylvanian army - said Szymanowski.
At the awards ceremony, three national level winners - high school students from the cities of Lublin in Eastern Poland, Lodz in Central Poland, and Jaroslaw in Southeastern Poland - and about fifty other awarded students received scholarships and material gifts. The main prize was 3,500 zlotys (HUF 290,850). The teachers who prepared the students for the competition were also rewarded with valuable prizes.
The competition was organized under the honorary patronage of the Polish Minister of Education and the Hungarian Ambassador. The ceremony was attended by Andrzej Klarkowski , the deputy head of the Polish Prime Minister's Office, and Tomasz Zielinski , a member of the lower house of the ruling Law and Justice party, vice-chairman of the Polish-Hungarian friendship section of the parliament, and the originator of the competition.
Source: MTI
(Cover image: zaszlo.hu )
