The council meeting will run alongside a meeting of ministers of the Forum of Slavic Cultures, a 13-member organisation seated in Slovenia that promotes cooperation among Slavic nations.

As part of its presidency of CoMoCoSEE, Slovenia hosted a meeting of national experts in the area of cultural heritage in February focusing on cooperation in ongoing projects.

This was followed in March by a meeting of national experts in the area of culture that focused on promoting integration of culture and arts education in the region.

Indeed, the focal point of Slovenia's presidency has been arts education with an emphasis on human capital and reforms of education system for a more effective way of dealing with the economic crisis.

As part of this, the country has also promoted the basic UNESCO documents on arts education: The Road Map for Arts Education and the Seoul Agenda on Goals for the Development of Arts Education.

The Brdo pri Kranju meeting will conclude with the adoption of a closing declaration that has been formed on the conclusions and recommendations of the expert groups. Slovenia will then hand over the presidency to Macedonia.

On hand for the symbolic handover between Slovenian Culture Minister Uroš Grilc and his Macedonian counterpart Elizabeta Kančeska Milevska will be the UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova and European Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou.

The accompanying programme to the meetings will get under way on Monday, when a regional travelling exhibition "Imaging the Balkans, Identities and Memory in the Long 19th Century" will be opened at the National Museum in Ljubljana.

Coordinated by UNESCO, the show was created in cooperation with national history museums from the region and the UNESCO office in Venice with the support of the International Council of Museums.

Modelled on the Nordic Council, the CoMoCoSEE was established in March 2005 in Copenhagen in an effort to create a forum for cultural exchange in SE Europe as a means of promoting peace, prosperity and coexistence in the region.

The council brings together culture ministers from Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Romania, Slovenia, Serbia, Moldova and Turkey, while Austria has been an observer since 2008.

As a side event, the meeting of ministers of the Forum of Slavic Cultures will debate the situation of Slavic nations in the current European and global political trends.

The Forum of Slavic Cultures will also organise an accompanying programme to celebrate the 1150th anniversary of the start of Slavic writing and the arrival of St Cyril and Methodius to Moravia.

The meeting is expected to conclude with the adoption of a memorandum on cooperation in culture and promotion of cooperation in European and other international organisations.

In another accompanying event, an exhibition of the Codex Suprasliensis, a cherished Cyrillic manuscript, will be opened at the National and University Library in Ljubljana on Tuesday. Included on UNESCO's Memory of the World list, the manuscript united all Slavic nations.