Minister of culture of the Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol Arina Novoselskaya supported the idea of including the cultural heritage of the Crimea’s Southern Coast inclusion into the UNESCO World Heritage List.

The group of experts of the project "Crimea’s Southern Coast – World Heritage Territory", organized by the Foundation named after D. S. Likhachev and the State Hermitage Museum (with the support of the Presidential Grants Foundation) held a survey of the Crimea’s Southern Coast as a complex object of cultural heritage and developed proposals for its preservation in April 2018.

Experts concluded that the Crimea’s Southern Coast has a complex value, which includes historical, cultural and natural components. The cultural policy on the territory of the Crimea’s Southern Coast should be treated as a unique cultural and natural complex, a man-made three-hundred-year-old coastal park, which is a necklace of palaces that used to belong to the Romanov family and other noble Russian names, as well as prominent representatives of Russian culture of the XVIII-XX centuries, archaeological sites, natural objects with exquisite aesthetic allure. At the same time, the chaotic and non-scale construction of a number of settlements (primarily Yalta) represents a real threat to the preservation of the values mentioned above.

Svetlana Adaksina, Chief State Hermitage Museum Curator, Head of the South Crimean Archaeological Expedition, claimed that the administration of the Hermitage expected including the cultural heritage of Crimea’s Southern Coast into the UNESCO World Heritage List. The joint project of the Hermitage and the Likhachev Foundation "Crimea’s Southern Coast – World Heritage Territory" is planned to be presented at the St. Petersburg International Cultural Forum in mid-November.

"We support this project. That's a very interesting concept. The UNESCO object is very strict security zones. The fewer buildings around our cultural heritage, the more we will save, " said Novoselskaya. The Minister stressed that she was ready to contribute to the implementation of the project.