The CLEOPATRA EU research project aims to make sense of the massive digital coverage generated by the events of global importance in Europe over the past decade. CLEOPATRA offers a unique interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral research and training programme, which explores how we can begin to analyse and understand the major events that influence and shape our lives and our societies. It facilitates advanced cross-lingual processing of textual and visual information related to key contemporary events at scale, and develops innovative methods for efficient and intuitive user access to and interaction with multilingual information.