Croatian-Slovenian Meeting

Petrcane (Zadar), Croatia, June 13-17, 2007

The 16th Croatian-Slovenian Crystallographic Meeting was held in Petrcane, a small but famous tourist resort 10 km from Zadar to the west, in the middle of the Croatian Adriatic coast, in the hotel Pinija ( "Pine tree" ). The Meeting was organized jointly by the Croatian Crystallographic Association ( CCA ) and the Slovenian Crystallographic Society ( SCS ), under the auspices of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. The Honorary Presidents were Boris Kamenar ( CCA ) and Ljubo Golic ( SCS ), while the Co-Chairs were Stanko Popovic ( CCA ) and Ivan Leban ( SCS ). The Meeting was open to all aspects of crystallography and its applications. There were 85 active participants and 15 accompanying persons from 13 countries, enjoying a friendly atmosphere of the Meeting, an unspoiled nature with clear sea water ( warm enough for bathing ) and pine woods, as well as nearby old towns of Zadar and Nin, with preserved Roman and Middle Age Croatian monuments. The participants presented 4 plenary lectures and 62 short oral contributions. The official language of the Meeting was, as traditionally, English.

You can see some photographs from the meeting here!

Introductory talk of S. Popovic

Dear ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues and friends,
on behalf of the Organizing Committee, on behalf of the Croatian Crystallographic Association and Slovenian Crystallographic Society, and on behalf of the Honorary Presidents of the Meeting, may I express my happiness that our crystallographic community is together again, to attend one more meeting. My warm greetings to all of you, to all participants, to crystallographers from Slovenia, to those from Croatia, and especially to those from other countries, to our plenary lecturers, our sponsors and guests. Let me remind you of our previous Croatian-Slovenian & Slovenian-Croatian crystallographic meetings
  • 1st, 1992, Otocec, Slovenia, on the banks of the beautiful and clear Krka river, flowing close to an old medieval burgh
  • 2nd, 1993, Stubicke Toplice, Croatia, in the picturesque and green Croatian Zagorje ( "the Region on the other side of the Zagreb Mountain" )
  • 3rd, 1994, Kranjska Gora, Slovenia, at the foot of the skyscraping Julian Alps
  • 4th, 1995, Trakoscan, Croatia, again in the Croatian Zagorje, near a romantic medieval castle, now a museum of fine arts
  • 5th, 1996, Zrece, Slovenia, at the foot of the monumental Pohorje Mountain
  • 6th, 1997,Umag, Croatia, on the west Istrian, Adriatic, coast
  • 7th, 1998, Radenci Spa, Slovenia, in a green picturesque north-east and wine-rich part of Slovenia
  • 8th, 1999, the Red Island, Croatia, off-shore of the town of Rovinj, the west Istrian coast, enjoying a splendid isolation from civilization
  • 9th, 2000, Gozd Martuljek, Slovenia, close to the very heart of the Julian Alps
  • 10th, 2001, Lovran, Croatia, on the east Istrian coast, near Opatija and at the foot of the powerful Ucka Mountain
  • 11th, 2002, Bohinj, ( hotel Jezero, the Lake ), Slovenia, in the heart of the famous Triglav National Park
  • 12th, 2003, National Park Plitvice Lakes ( hotel Jezero, the Lake ), Croatia, UNESCO protected natural world heritage
  • 13th, 2004, Bovec, Slovenia, at the bank of the unique and clear Soca river, flowing among the Alps
  • 14th, 2005, Vrsar, Croatia, halfway between Porec and Rovinj, the famous tourist resorts in Istria
  • 15th, 2006, Jezersko, Slovenia, an important climatic resort, in between two mountain ranges, Karavanke and Kamnik-Savinja Alps
  • 16th, 2007, Petrcane, Croatia, between Zadar and Nin, famous historic places, full of antique Roman and Croatian monuments.
As you can notice, the density of places of our meetings increases steadily by time. We do hope it will continue in the future, as we have a full confidence in our young generation to be responsible for that task. I do believe that this Meeting will be at least at the same scientific level as the previous ones, and that we shall enjoy our stay here. Thank you so much, to all of you, that you have found time and energy to participate in this Meeting and so to contribute to its scientific success. Our meetings become more and more popular. A proof for that are notices in the issues of the IUCr Newsletter. At the end of the Book of Abstracts of the present Meeting you can find a history of our Meetings as appeared in the IUCr Newsletter. The present Meeting was also announced in the IUCr Newsletter, Vol. 14, No.3, 2006. Let me express my gratitude to the members of the Organizing Committee, who have voluntarily performed a great job: M. Bijelic, M. Cetina, V. Kaucic, N. Lah, M. Luic, D. Matkovic-Calogovic, A. Meden, A. Prodan, A. Santic, Z. Skoko, Z. Stefanic, A. Tonejc, A. Visnjevac.We are also grateful fo the sponsors for the financial support of the Meeting:
  • MINISTRY OF SCIENCE, EDUCATION AND SPORT OF THE REPUBLIC OF CROATIA;
  • PLIVA D.D., CROATIA, A MEBER OF THE BARR GROUP;
  • RENACON D.O.O., CROATIA, REPRESENTATIVE OF PANALYTICAL;
  • MERCATOR-H, D.O.O. CROATIA;
  • MIKRO+POLO D.O.O, SLOVENIA, REPRESENTATIVE OF BRUKER-AXS;
  • RIGAKU - MOLECULAR STRUCTURE CORPORATION, UNITED KINGDOM;
  • OXFORD DIFFRACTION LTD, UNITED KINGDOM;
  • ZAGREBACKA BANKA, CROATIA;
  • HOTEL PINIJA, PETRCANE, CROATIA.
This support is of great importance, as this Meeting ( like previous ones ) is organized without the registration fee.I wish to all of you a very pleasant stay in Petrcane and a successful Meeting.


Closing remarks of I. Leban:

Ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues,
I will start with a story. When I sat in a hotel lobby two days ago at the beginning of the Meeting, properly dressed with a tie and my dancing shoes, one lady came to me and said in a questionable way: "I really did not realise that we have an organized trip today." She recognized me mistakenly as a tourist guide of this beautiful Zadar region, not as one of the scientists at this conference. I hope that this does not imply that crystallographers are looking like tourist guides. So, I am not wearing a tie at this occasion.Everything eventually comes to an end. So, this is the end of the 16th Croatian-Slovenian Crystallographic Meeting. These meetings started 16 years ago ( as the continuation of the Yugoslav meetings, 1966-1991), and during this time we have visited many beautiful spots in Croatia and in Slovenia. And we also have experienced quite a diversity of the science in our field of crystallography. I always start this final report with a kind of statistics - first data which leads to the information, then analysis and at the end prospects and trends. We had four plenary lecturers:Carmelo Giacovazzo (Bari, Italy) talked about the powerful tool for crystal structure determination and refinement from powder data. Nenad Tomasic (Zagreb) presented the work on metamict minerals - that is to say - amorphous materials thought originally to be crystalline. Radomir Kuzel (Prague, Czech Republic) gave us a comprehensive insight in the process known as severe plastic deformation. Bojan Kozlevcar (Ljubljana) talked about the correlation between magnetic properties and structures of Cu(II) coordination compounds. The 62 oral presentations covered various fields of crystallography, from minerals to proteins, from chemical crystallography to structural science, from computer software to presentation of fancy equipments. I would like to express my sincere thanks to the organizers, not only to S. Popovic, but also to all young generation who took part in the organization of this Meting. They picked really a nice venue and we enjoyed the trip to historic towns of Nin and Zadar. There we visited the smallest cathedral in the world (12th century AD), Roman Forum, St. Donat Church ( dated to 900 AD, as found by 14C spectroscopy ), "Gold and Silver of Zadar", preserved from the 10th century AD in the monastery of St. Mary. We also visited a very recent object, the sea organs, where the sea waves play a marveleous music. My thanks are to Professor B. Kamenar who kept an eye on us and to our plenary lecturers and other foreign quest who are really ambassadors of our Meting. This is especially to Professors E. Tillmanns (Vienna), H. Wondratschek (Karlsruhe), H. Flack (Geneva), M. Jaskolski (Poznan), G. Jovanovski (Skopje), M. Melnik (Bratislava), K. Fischer (Saarbruecken), G. Giester (Vienna) and many others. What is really an advantage of this meeting is that, we do not charge the registration fee. In the global capitalistic world one could object to that - some would call us stupid. But my view on this matter is somehow linked with two persons , Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds. Bill Gates produced Microsoft - payable software, the other was a Finnish student who produced source code - Linux available free to all. I am much in favour of Linus Torvalds. In this respect I would like to thank all the sponsors of this Meting. To end up. From my personal point I acquired really some additional knowledge: chiral, achiral, centrosymmetric, non-centrosymmetric, absolute structure, absolute configuration ; this is all part of so call fashionable nowadays "lifelong learning" or is it "long life learning" ! And there were also some other extraordinary events at this meeting , for example my dear friend P. Segedin used for the first time in his life ppt presentation ; the generation to come will talk about that and we shall also talk about the other miracles which happened. There will be a lot of additional talk during the farewell dinner tonight and I just wish you all the best, safe journey to your homes and see you soon in Slovenia , probably in Ptuj, 19-21st June, 2008.
All additional information at e-mail: ivan.leban@fkkt.uni-lj.si.

Comments after the Meeting

Mariusz Jaskolski ( Poznan, Poland ):Our drive home was safe and enjoyable, but my memory is stil occupied by images of your beautiful country. Thank you very much for organizing such a successful Meeting in Petrcane and for extending an extremely warm hospitality to your foreign guests. I was very pleased and gratified to see the scale and diversity of crystallographic research done in Croatia and Slovenia.

Hans Wondratschek (Karlsruhe, Germany ): I would like to thank the crystallographic communities of Croatia and Slovenia for excellent Meeting and the friendly atmosphere and I am looking forward to meeting you next year again.

Howard Flack ( Geneva, Switzerland ): Thanks very much indeed for the very interesting conference in Petrcane organized in a very professional way, in a delightful place and with very friendly people. We enjoyed very much looking at the photographs which appeared on the web site a few days ago.

S. Popovic, I. Leban



The final programme of the meeting:
Final programme Cro-Slo_final_schedule.pdf
Short contributions Short_contributions.pdf




The following sponsors are supporting the Meeting: