ECHOES along with six Sister Projects made a strong impact at the Digital Heritage Summit event held in Limassol, Cyprus at the end of May with involvement in several of the round tables and discussions.
The four-day Digital Heritage Summit took place from 26th-29th May 2026 during the Cypriot Presidency of the Council of the EU and under the auspices of the Deputy Minister of Culture. It featured addresses from EU representatives, UNESCO, and international institutional partners and networks. The programme of high-level dialogue, strategic policy discussions, hands-on experimentation, and collaborative innovation highlighted Europe’s leading position in the digitisation of Cultural Heritage.
On the first day, Round Table 2: Why we Digitise Cultural Heritage, its Use & ReUse; Persistent Virtual Worlds and AI explored why digitisation is essential for cultural heritage today, in a context shaped by digital access, risk management, and cross-border collaboration. It addressed key dimensions such as standards, acquisition protocols, interoperability, ethics, long-term preservation, accessibility, and the reuse of high-quality 3D assets. ECHOES had a strong presence with the speakers including Xavier Rodier, the ECHOES Coordinator, and representatives from five Sister projects: TEXTaiLES (Aggelos Gkiokas), Heritalise (Mikel Borras), ARXIVE (Xenophon Zabulis), StratiGraph (Valentina Vassallo), UNICHE (George Ioannidis) and also Europeana and the Data Space for Cultural Heritage (Harry Verwayen).
ECHOES and the Sister Projects speakers
Sorin Hermon speaking at the 3D Reconstruction session.
Days two and three of the Summit consisted of a Hackathon dedicated to a collaborative and practical Digital Heritage Hackathon focused on the reuse of high-quality 3D Cultural Heritage data as well as a number of Parallel sessions. ECHOES was highly present on Day two, the 27th:
- The 3D Reconstruction and Knowledge session in the afternoon involved Xavier Rodier (ECHOES) and Sorin Hermon (CYI) presenting how integrated semantics and 3D reconstruction approaches are applied within the ECHOES environment for conservation purposes, using the case study of St. John Lambadistis monastery.
- Valentina Vassallo (CYI) presented a poster on the StratiGraph project.
On Day 3:
- In the session “Visualising the Past: 3D viewers, standardisation and data long-term preservation“, Sorin Hermon (CYI) showcased the 3D modelling of the Kampanopetra basilica as an example of 3D technologies developed at CNR and deployed in the ECHOES project.
Day 4, the 29th, was the final day with a keynote speech and more Round Tables.
Xavier Rodier participated in the Round Table: Digitisation as a Tool Against illicit Trafficking. He and Corinne Szteinsznaider (Michael Culture) focused on “Mission 4 – Data and Infrastructures : European infrastructures and the missing cross-disciplinary backbone for anti-trafficking data”. The outcome of this was the issue of a draft Position paper for establishment of a European Interdisciplinary Competence Centre dedicated to combating the illicit trafficking and looting of cultural goods. The following aspects were discussed by the panel of experts:
- Capacity building, awareness raising and the external dimension,
- Building capacities and partnerships beyond borders,
- Training, awareness, and global heritage protection,
- A Competence Centre for Cultural Heritage Protection – from vision to implementation,
- Reviewing and adopting the Position Paper.
The Position Paper summarises the current situation as being a fractured ecosystem with a number of shortcomings attributed to structural differences and lack of continuous funding. The proposed solution is the Establishment of a Competence Centre which will bring together six interconnected communities: law enforcement agencies, cultural heritage institutions and professionals, social sciences and humanities researchers, technology developers, civil society organisations, and educational communities. In particular, the Centre would would develop synergies with existing European initiatives. The Common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage and the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage will provide the technical backbone of European cultural heritage protection, and the Competence Centre would constitute the institutional backbone of the human network required to deploy that infrastructure effectively in prevention and investigation. In this respect, ECHOES will play an important role in the European Community’s fight against Cultural Heritage crime.
In summary, the Digital Heritage Summit provided an excellent opportunity for ECHOES and the Sister Projects to showcase the breadth and versatility of the Cultural Heritage Cloud in terms of the different subject areas and tools and services that are under development. The sessions demonstrated how the projects are coordinating and working together to achieve a common aim. As well as ECHOES being in continuous dialogue with Data Space, together all the projects are actively shaping the current debate on Digital Heritage and the Digital Commons.
With thanks to Dr. Eleftherios Anastasovitis (MusicSphere and EXCALIBUR) for his contribution to this article.
