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.