This year the Committee unanimously decided to award the 34th Silver Plate to the Romanian Ritisan Avel for contributing to the birth of the Alpine Rescue of Romania and for his many years of rescuer activity. He has been with Alpine Rescue since the beginning, laid the foundations for Romanian Alpine Rescue, trained hundreds of rescuers and supported many Alpine Rescue Teams. ” Ritisan has a whole mountain life behind him. Still very young at the head of the National Mountain School; he refined his experience with climbing the Tatra mountains in what was then Czechoslovakia. In 1969, after participating as a climber in some rescues, he joined the 1st Romanian Mountain Rescue Team. The following year he became an instructor of the Alpine Rescue School. In 1975 he founded and leads the Hunedoara Mountain Rescue Team until 1991 in the Retezat mountains. To the rescue activity he combines an intense mountaineering activity conquering with the Romanian expeditions the peaks of the Caucasus (Ushba and Shurovski), participating in climbing in Pamir, on the Himalaya, where he arrives first on the Gurija Himal peak (7193 m), opens about fifty of routes in the mountains of Romania, reaches the peak of Broad Peak (8407), the first Romanian to surpass the 8000m peaks. In 2000 he founded “Salasi del Sus” the first mountain rescue service in a mountain town. He is currently a member of the Cheia Ciucas Alpine Rescue Station in the Prahova province, whose mayor accompanied him to Pinzolo. He has participated in over 200 relief operations.
The gold medal was also awarded to the memory of the five members of the Alpine Rescue of Slovenia who perished on the wall in 1997 during an exercise with helicopters.
Numerous civil, religious and military authorities, Italian and foreign delegations were present at the evocative ceremony on Saturday 24 September in the council hall, cheered by the notes of the Choir Presanella and ended with lunch in honor of the award winner.
The program included, as is customary, the meeting of the prizewinner and the leaders of the Alpine Rescue of Romania with the pupils and students of the elementary and middle schools of Pinzolo and Caderzone Terme, who asked them an infinite number of questions. On the evening of Friday, the book “John Paul II … pilgrim among us” was presented at Palazzo Bertelli in Caderzone, with the story of the witnesses and the participation of the Hon. Antonio Maccanico, former Secretary General of the Presidency of the Republic and Monsignor Claudio Giuliadori, Director of the National Social Communications Office of the C.E.I.
