The series of European Liquid Crystal Conferences began in 1991 in Courmayeur, Italy, and was the result of a merger between the Liquid Crystal Conferences of the Socialist Countries of Eastern Europe with the Winter Liquid Crystal Conferences and Workshops that had been running for a number of years. This year's meeting was the 5th in the series of biannual conferences, and it was a departure from tradition to deny the participants the opportunities of winter sports. However, the selection of Crete for the venue provided other distractions such as the sun, the sea and above all the history and culture of Crete. Europeans tend to look to mainland Greece as the source of their culture and civilization, but the Minoan civilization was more than 2000 years in advance of Greece, and so it is proper for European science to pay homage to its Cretan roots.