"Our pride is tremendous. To live here is a gift and a privilege, and inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List is the crown of our work. Our walls were built as part of a fortification system and today they have become a universal value connecting cities and peoples," Mayor Dukic said at a ceremony which was also attended by Culture Minister Nina Obuljen Korzinek.
Bandarin stressed that UNESCO supported serial nominations as it did not want its list to consist exclusively of national treasures.
The bad news is that your are all a single entry. The good news is that it will encourage you to continue cooperating in preserving the heritage, Bandarin said, stressing that Zadar's St. Donatus Church was the most important example of the Carolingian culture in the world.
Minister Obuljen Korzinek said that in its future work on its cultural and development projects Zadar would be cooperating with other cities from Italy and Montenegro that had been inscribed on the UNESCO list.
She recalled that Zadar was home to UNESCO's centre for underwater archaeology, the first of the kind in the world.
Croatia, Italy and Montenegro in 2016 proposed to UNESCO to inscribe on its World Heritage List the transnational cultural good "Venetian Works of Defence between the 16th and 17th Centuries".
Apart from Zadar city walls, originally built to keep out the invading Ottoman forces, also inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List on Thursday, as part of the same project, was the St. Nicholas Fortress in Sibenik.