The speech of Prime Minister Edi Rama, honored guest of the Bavarian government, to deliver the speech of the occasion at the opening ceremony of the Herrenchiemsee Festspiele, where every year a guest addresses the theme of Europe.

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Dear Eric,

Honorable hosts,

Ladies and gentlemen,

To stand here on the Island of Herrenchiemsee beneath the vaults of a palace born not from politics but from a dream, a dream of beauty solitude and transcendence is to feel something greater than architecture more enduring than stone, It is to be embraced by an idea made timeless.

To be invited here before you on this singular occasion, it is not merely an honor It is a rare privilege. One I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life King Ludwig II Bavarian sovereign who built this place was called mad, mad for spending fortunes not on armies but on Wagner not on conquest, but on the perfection of the beautiful Mad in other words for choosing the spirit over the sword.

He once said, ’’I want to remain an eternal enigma to myself and to the others’’,  and in doing so he became something else the last great romantic of power a man who ruled not through decrease, but through dreams and here we are in the heart of that dream at a time when Europe our shared home our collective legacy, finds itself once again surrounded by the noise of weapons the fear of fracture and the temptation of forgetting, what binds us?

Tonight through music we are called to remember. To remember that Europe was never just a treaty or a currency- Never just a parliament or a market. Europe was and must remain a civilization. A way of feeling the world. A way of believing, as Ludwig did, that beauty has political weight. That the arts are not a luxury, but a lifeline.

This festival is not just a cultural event. It is, in its own quiet defiance, a gathering of resistance. Resistance to the cynicism that reduces Europe to bureaucracy. Resistance to the despair that sees culture as decoration. Resistance to the noise that drowns out the human voice. In Albania, we know what silence sounds like. We live for decades behind the iron curtain of our own making, cut off from the symphonies and sonatas that filled the concert halls of free Europe and yet, even then, music found a way a smuggled tape, a forbidden score, a memory of a concert from before the walls rose.

I remember as a boy seeing for the first time Ludwig. The haunting masterpiece by Luchino Visconti. Not in a cinema, not even in color, but in black and white through a small TV box. Captured by an illegal antenna made of cloth hangers that defied the regime’s ban on foreign television. That film, that strange, poetic descent into the soul of a king who loved too much and too beautifully, left a mark on me.         Not just as a viewer, but as a future citizen of a Europe I had not yet seen. Frankly, I did not imagine that time I would see in person one day.

Now Albanian musicians study Munich and Berlin. Now German musicians perform in Tirana. Now our children grow up not dreaming of escape, but of collaboration. This is not a coincidence. This is Europe doing what Europe was made to do. To unite through creation, to elevate through exchange and how can I stand here, in Bavaria, without remembering a bold gesture from this very land?

One that history nearly forgot, but we don’t. In 1984, when Albania was still close to the world, Franz Josef Strauss, Bavaria’s own towering figure, came to Albania. He came not with threats, but with offers. Not to flatter the brutal regime, but to open a window for Albania’s people. He extended a hand to a country that didn’t know how to take it. The regime said no. History, thankfully, said wait.

Today, that same hand is still felt. Albania was closed and now Albania is open and grateful. That moment matters because it proves that bridges are not built only when the crossing is easy. Sometimes they are built in silence, waiting for the other side to appear. Let me be honest. The Europe I dream of is not one where we all speak the same language or believe the same things. It is a Europe where Bavarian kings’ obsession with beauty can speak across centuries to a modern-day Albanian Prime Minister and find agreement. It is a Europe where Bavarian statesmen’s forgotten outreach can become the roots of today’s friendship. So to our host in Bavaria, thank you with all my heart. Not just for this invitation, but for the example you continue to set. Bavaria reminds us that economic might and cultural depth are not opposites, they are twins.

That prosperity without poetry is hollow. That power without memory is blind, that Europe without soul is not Europe and if we need to rearm to protect Europe’s soil, we need also to reinvent ourselves to protect Europe’s soul. Allow me also to thank Minister President Markus Soder, not just as a statesman of conviction and clarity, but as a friend. Albania values his voice, values his vision for Bavaria, and values his respect for Europe’s diversity. And I value personally the warmth and understanding your, Minister President, have shown, which are not, trust me, as common as they should be in our continent’s high circles.

Tonight, let the music we are about to hear do what speeches cannot and let the beauty of this palace add to it what words cannot. Let it carry the soul of Europe, the one Ludwig heard when others heard nothing. The one we must protect, not just in treaties and not simply with soldiers, but in our streets, in our kids’ classrooms, and in the quiet corners of our dreams.

Let us be as Ludwig was, a little mad at least, maybe not so mad, mad enough to believe in beauty, mad enough to defend it, mad enough to make beauty the heart of Europe again.

Thank you.