First notes on the study of the legislation on cultural heritage of the Western Balkans and the implementation of the UNESCO Conventions. The identity role of religious cultural heritage: a proposal for their tourism valorization.

The regulation that deals with the management of cultural heritage is in continuous evolution because it must increasingly be measured with the lack of resources that in the past came almost exclusively from the general tax system or by using patronage of some private individuals. Cultural assets, taken as a whole as a proper asset of the territory, nowa- days must not only be valued for conservation purposes, but economically promoted to find on the market the resources necessary for their conserva- tion, restoration and development. That is the reason why the legislation of cultural heritage is evolving in the direction of identifying management tools that enhance the ability to impact and the economic significance. The cultural theme parks become the new model of economic, adminis- trative and legal management of these assets. They consist of parts of territories characterized by different combina- tions of natural and human elements that illustrate the evolution of local communities. The cultural heritage contained in them becomes a shared cul- tural heritage, that is not always limited to the national territory, but which goes beyond the political borders of the States. The identification of this shared cultural heritage traces not only the mor- phological and ethnographic characteristics of the territory, but also the re- lationship with the religious affiliations of the population. One of the backbones of the management of the Western Balkans terri- tory consists of the Via Egnatia from which branches off the roads into the surrounding territory, involved in the cultural and religious dissemination that characterizes it. It follows that it is possible to identify an area that gravitates around Lake Ohrid, as a driving cultural center for theological studies and the develop- ment of the Macedonian, Bulgarian and Serbian-Croatian language; the role of the Orthodox monasteries mostly located in Kosovo; the characteristics of the settlements of Turkish and Ottoman populations that characterize the center of Albania. Thus, an area that was traditionally neglected, gains importance and sig- nificance, being today at the attention of a tourism that favors the rediscov- ery of the territory and the ancient communication streets of the Balkan area. This paper, therefore, through a study of the history, culture, religion and legislation of the populations of the western Balkan area, seeks to highlight the topic of interstate collaboration and the need to enhance the religious heritage, also identified by UNESCO, by creating religious cultural parks