Balkan mayors gather in Athens

Mayors from 44 Balkan cities have arrived in Athens to attend the second gathering of the B40 Balkan Cities Network on Monday and Tuesday.

During Monday’s session, the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, who hosted the network’s inaugural meeting on November 29-30, 1921, will deliver a report on the year of the presidency and transfer the presidency to Athens mayor Kostas Bakoyannis.

Bakoyannis gave his fellow mayors a private tour of the Acropolis Museum on Sunday evening and then hosted a dinner.

The 2-day event, focusing on environmentally-friendly construction technologies, will be held at the Technopolis cultural venue and the industrial museum. The mayors will also have time for a bilateral meeting and meet in four working groups on Local Climate Action; Local Democracy and Migration; Smart Cities and Digital Transformation; and Local Economic Cooperation.

Imamoglu, a social democrat, is a likely candidate for the Turkish presidency and is considered the likeliest among opposition politicians to topple President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. His sentence to a 2-year, 7-and-a-half-month prison term last December 14 for ‘insulting’ ers of the Turkish Supreme election Council “fools” in a 2020 press release is being appealed, and he has not lost his political rights, at least not yet.

Ads1

Ads1
Gct

Recent Posts

Archbishop of Australia Arrives in Cuba to Mark 20th Anniversary of Saint Nicholas Church Consecration

Archbishop Makarios of Australia arrived in Havana on January 22, 2025, to represent Ecumenical Patriarch…

3 hours ago

Maria Menounos: Visited Her Mother's Grave with Her Daughter – "It Hurts When You Need Her and She's Not There"

Maria Menounos shared an emotional moment on Instagram, visiting her late mother's grave with her…

3 hours ago

Commemorating Jews of Greece: International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Seventy-six years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Greece remembers the victims of the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust,…

3 hours ago

Turkey-Greece Visa Program Sparks Tourism Boom, Strengthens Bilateral Ties

Since Greece introduced its visa-on-arrival program for Turkish citizens in April 2024, over 100,000 Turkish…

3 hours ago

Amidst Personal Challenges, Aryna Sabalenka and Georgios Frangulis Strengthen Their Bond

Aryna Sabalenka, the world No. 1, sought to make history with a third consecutive Australian…

6 hours ago

Israeli Airlines Reroute Flights from Paphos to Larnaca Due to Security Concerns

In response to undisclosed security concerns, the Israel General Security Service, Shin Bet, has instructed…

6 hours ago