Croatian-Slovenian meeting

Petrcane (Zadar), Croatia, June, 2007

The 16^th Croatian-Slovenian Crystallographic Meeting was held in Petrcane, a tourist resort on the Croatian Adriatic coast. The meeting was organized by the Croatian Crystallographic Society (SCS), under the auspices of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (CCA). The Honorary Presidents were Boris Kamenar (CCA) and Ljubo Golic (SCS), and the Co-Chairs were Stanko Popovic (CCA) and Ivan Leban (SCS). There were 85 participants from 13 countries. The meeting was supported by the Ministry of Science, Education and Sport, Pliva, Croatia; Panalytical; Mercator; Bruker-Axs; Rigaku-Molecular Structure Corporation; Zagrebacka Banka, and Hotel Pinija of Petrcane, Croatia. This support is of great importance, as this meeting was organized without registration fees.
There were four plenary lecturers. Carmelo Giacovazzo (Italy) talked about powerful tools for crystal structure determination and refinement from powder data. Nenad Tomasic (Zagreb) presented work on metamict minerals, – amorphous materials thought originally to be crystalline. Radomir Kuzel (Czech Republic) provided comprehensive insight into the process known as severe plastic deformation. Bojan Kozlevcar (Ljubljana) discussed the correlation between magnetic properties and structures of Cu(II) coordination compounds. The 62 oral presentations covered various fields, from minerals to proteins, from chemical crystallography to structural science, and from computer software to sophisticated equipments.

An excursion to Nin and Zadar included visits to the smallest cathedral in the world (12^th century AD), a Roman Forum, and St. Donat Church (dated by 14C spectroscopy to 900 AD).

S. Popovic and I. Leban

Remarkable remarks from the meeting:

There were extraordinary events at this meeting, for example my dear friend P. Segedin used a powerpoint presentation for the first time (I Leban).

Thank you very much for organizing such a successful meeting and for extending extremely warm hospitality to your foreign guests. I was gratified to see the scale and diversity of crystallographic research done in Croatia and Slovenia. (Mariusz Jaskolski, Poznan, Poland ).

Thanks very much indeed for the very interesting conference organized in a very professional way, in a delightful place and with very friendly people. (Howard Flack, Geneva, Switzerland).