The Government today created the consultative commission in charge of defining by May the program for the commemorations of the 500th anniversary of the birth of Luís de Camões, to be held during one year, starting on June 10, 2024.
The order creating the commission for the “Commemorations of the V Centenary of the Birth of Luís de Camões” was signed today jointly by the Minister of Culture, Pedro Adão e Silva, and the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, Francisco André, according to a statement from the Ministry of Culture sent to the Lusa news agency.
The proposed program, according to this order, “must be submitted to the government by May 20,” with the commemorations beginning on June 10, 21 days later, extending for a year until the following June 10, the Day of Camões, Portugal and the Communities in 2025.
The creation of the consultative commission was determined in May 2021, by resolution of the Council of Ministers, establishing its composition by representatives of the “entities responsible for coordinating the various dimensions of the program”, whose mission is to define this program until the end of 2022, together with the commissioner appointed since then, Professor Rita Marnoto, from the University of Coimbra.
According to the order signed today, the commission is made up of representatives of the Camões Institute, namely the researcher Joaquim Coelho Ramos and the director of Cultural Services, Cristina Caetano; of the National Library of Portugal (BNP), by the director, Inês Cordeiro, and the deputy director-general, Margarida Lopes; of the Directorate-General for Books, Archives and Libraries (DGLAB), through the deputy director-general Bruno Eiras; and the director-general for the Arts, Américo Rodrigues.
Camões – Instituto de Cooperação e da Língua will be the “entity responsible for coordinating the external dimension of the program”, the BNP will have “the coordination of the internal dimension”, DGLAB, “the coordination of the book, library and reading dimension”, and the Directorate-General for the Arts will coordinate “the artistic dimension of the program”, as the Ministry of Culture’s statement reads.
On the 20th, in an interview with the Lusa news agency, Professor Rita Marnoto, the commissioner appointed to prepare the commemorations program, in coordination with the planned structures, said that there was nothing more than the government’s intention to mark the date.
The resolution of the Council of Ministers of 2021, which decided to hold the commemorations, appointed the commissioner and established the creation of a Commission of Honor by the President of the Republic, the commission now created by order of the ministries of Foreign Affairs and Culture, and also the creation of a mission structure.
The same law stipulated that the program should be completed and proposed to the government by the end of 2022, and that the commemorations would take place between March 12, 2024 and June 10, 2025.
However, Rita Marnoto, a literature specialist, told Lusa at the time that no measures had been taken to create these structures until then, a necessary condition for the development of the project and the program.
“I’m waiting for the two committees and the mission structure to be appointed,” Rita Marnoto told Lusa last week. “The creation of the two commissions and the mission structure are a condition for the commissioner to be able to start working, to do her projects, to do the programming.”
The 2021 resolution of the Council of Ministers stressed the importance of the commemorations of the fifth centenary of the birth of Luís Vaz de Camões (1524-1580), considering it “a unique opportunity” to think about the legacy of “one of the greatest figures in universal literature […], recognized as the founder of an idea of universality that today appears to us as revolutionary in writing, vocation and thought.”
