Egypt’s Supreme Council of Culture celebrates Egyptian-Chilean cultural ties

CAIRO – 9 September 2021: The Supreme Council of Culture, in cooperation with the Foreign Cultural Relations Sector, held an evening entitled “Egypt & Chile - Cultural Relations”, as part of the Cultural Relations Initiative organized by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture.

Head of the Supreme Council of Culture Hisham Azmy began the evening by praising the Cultural Relations Initiative, stressing that this initiative confirms that Egypt has been and will continue to view cultural relations with other countries as “precious”.

The initiative begins its second year, where the first evening was held in September 2020, and today is the 23rd evening of the initiative.

Azmy explained that relations between Egypt and Chile date back to the early 20thcentury. On the cultural level, a number of Chilean theater groups participated in the Experimental Theater Festival in Egypt.

According to Azmy, Egypt contributed to the establishment of the Center for Arab Studies at the University of Chile, and funded exchanged grants between the Ministries of Education and Higher Education of Egypt and Chile. This is in addition to the many prospects for cooperation between the two countries, including the translation movement of Egyptian literature into Spanish.

Ambassador of Chile to Egypt Pablo Arriaran spoke about the history of Chile and its geographical location, which is dominated by desert as in Egypt.

Arriaran explained that Chile comprises a number of different climates, and that, like most Latin American countries, immigrants live side by side with the indigenous people, clarifying the presence of Middle Eastern immigrants, mostly coming from Palestine, then Jordan and Syria, where there is 450,000 Chileans of Palestinian origin, according to Arriaran.

He further pointed out that Chile has two Nobel Prize winners for literature, the poet Gabriela Mistral in 1945, and the poet Pablo Neruda in 1971.

The Chilean ambassador stated that the relations between Egypt and Chile began in the twenties of the last century, and highlighted the bilateral cooperation between the two countries in international organizations.