Central Europe needs to sustain and transform a wide range of cultural heritage through innovative investment in projects with a lasting impact on regions and people. Churches and sacral architecture play a significant role especially in rural areas, as these monumental buildings need large scale investments, play a very important role for local communities and attract tourists. Transnational cooperation projects can help regions to look for long-term strategies for preservation and sustainable exploitation of cultural heritage and raising awareness of local actors.The strategies for the preservation of churches as well as raising awareness about preservation of sacral architecture are in the focus of the project THETRIS. Its partners also intend to explore innovative ways of improving cultural heritage tourism and issue recommendation for other European regions. Achievements: The focus of the "THETRIS" CENTRAL EUROPE project is the sustainable preservation of the local churches and sacral monuments in 11 partner regions by developing transnational church route, elaborating joint strategies and testing innovative solutions to preserve them. In the first year of project implementation besides fulfilling the start-up requirements (eg. setting up the project management structure, agreeing on content related as well as administrative issues) partners analysed their local/regional situation using the guidelines of the common methodology, provided by the responsible project partner. Each regional SWOT analysis focused on the following four aspects of cultural heritage protection: socio-economic context and entrepreneurship; routes and location; heritage and preservation; local identity and commitment. During the Transnational Working Group Meetings partners could discuss the most importantissues regarding the methodology, and later present their main findings and the responsible partners introduction about the common points serving as a basis for the Transnational SWOT. While looking deeply into their regional strengths and weaknesses, partners were also searching for good practices that might be used and adapted to the needs of other Central European regions. The collected good practices refer to three big theme: competitiveness and entrepreneurship (i.e. marketing strategies, tourism and cultural routes etc. that make the heritage linked to the church an economic asset); accessibility (i.e. means of transports, networks, connectivity that make the heritage linked to the church accessible); churches and Heritage Preservation Strategies (i.e. programmes, plans or models of restoration, preservation, management of the heritage linked to the church). During January - June 2013 partners also started to prepare for the transnational reviews as well as implementing their pilot actions that are taking place in a later stage. A transnational photo competitions rules were also defined, in order to involve local communities in the project, and call the attention of inhabitants in these rural areas on their cultural heritage connected to their churches. More information can be found about the project on its website (www.thetris.eu), that has also been developed in the first 6 month of the project.