Holistic Heritage

Head of the Kraków Heritage Hub Katarzyna Jagodzińska speaks to Tamas Fejerdy, a long-standing expert on cultural heritage and president of the Hungarian ICOMOS national committee. Tamas Fejerdy [https://culturalheritagestudies.ceu.edu/people/tamas-fejerdy]is a treasure trove of knowledge about monuments and heritage, both in Hungary and across Europe. We speak broadly on today’s challenges of heritage protection in Hungary, matters of authenticity, the role of civil society when it comes to heritage, taking several sites and projects in Budapest and in the Hungarian provinces as illustrations.

Estonia is on the front line with regards to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Being in such a position has forced decision makers to rethink official policy in times of war. How to protect tangible cultural heritage? How to tackle the country’s dissonant Soviet heritage? With the invasion of Ukraine, what measures has Estonia put in place so far and what good practices in general can the rest of Europe take on board so as to safeguard its cultural heritage? The Kraków Heritage Hub’s John Beauchamp and Katarzyna Jagodzińska speak to Riin Alatalu, Vice-President of ICOMOS  who holds the UNESCO Chair of Cultural Heritage Studies [https://www.artun.ee/en/people/riin-alatalu-2/] at the Estonian Academy of Fine Arts. We met during the Europa Nostra Cultural Heritage Summit held in Bucharest in October 2024.

Oleksandra Kovalchuk is the deputy director of the Fine Arts Museum in Odesa [https://www.ofam.ua/en] as well as the co-founder of the Museum For Change [https://www.mfcua.org/en/about] NGO, which actively seeks and supports cultural institutions in Ukraine in preserving their collections and assisting in ongoing operations. Head of the Kraków Heritage Hub, Katarzyna Jagodzińska met with Oleksandra Kovalchuk at the International Cultural Centre in September 2024 to hear the latest on how Ukraine’s cultural heritage is being fought for against the odds.

In the latest podcast in the Holistic Heritage series, the Kraków Heritage Hub’s John Beauchamp is in Bucharest for the 2024 European Cultural Heritage Summit, where he takes a closer look at the European Heritage Awards / Europa Nostra Awards. Since 2002, the awards have championed the best cultural heritage initiatives from across Europe, with a total of just under 4,000 entries from as many as 46 countries. Why is the award so popular? And for all the programmes which have been awarded, what has the impact been of the award? Find out why it is so important to apply and get your project highlighted by Europe’s leading cultural heritage organisation. In the podcast we hear from Jacek Purchla, Vice-President of Europa Nostra who was also Chairman of the awards jury in 2024. We also hear from Agata Wąsowska-Pawlik, Europa Nostra board member and director of the International Cultural Centre in Kraków, and Elena Bianchi, Programme Manager of the European Heritage Awards at Europa Nostra, who explains the ins and outs of the prize. And what about the former winners? How has the award made an influence on their projects? We hear from Eugen Vaida, who is now a jury member but whose Ambulance for Momuments [ambulanta-pentru-monumente.ro/despre/?lang=en]project rescues heritage-listed buildings across Romania (2020). Additionally, we hear from Anna Szekely from the Via Transilvanica [https://www.viatransilvanica.com/en/]in Romania (2023), Francesca Moncada from Le Dimore del Quartetto [https://ledimoredelquartetto.eu/en/] (2019), as well as this year’s winners: Łucja Cieślar and Paulina Adamska from the Serfenta Assocation [https://serfenta.pl/en/] in Cieszyn (Poland), Marek Gołosz from the Ignacy Historic Mine [https://www.kopalniaignacy.pl/en/] in Rybnik (Poland), and Caroline Fernolend from the Mihai Eminescu Trust [https://www.mihaieminescutrust.ro/en/](Romania). Do you have an amazing initiative which fits the bill and you think could win a prize? You can find out more details here [https://heritagehubkrakow.org/call-for-applications-for-the-european-heritage-awards-europa-nostra-awards-2025-is-now-open/].

Coming up in this episode, we go up to Lithuania to find out the activities undertaken in Kaunas following the city’s remarkable success as European Capital of Culture in 2022 and its inscription to the UNESCO World Heritage List [https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1661/] in 2023. During a meeting in Kraków, head of the Heritage Hub Katarzyna Jagodzińska speaks to researcher and architectural historian Vaidas Petrulis from the Kaunas University of Technology [https://en.ktu.edu/]. They talk about the specificity of Kaunas’ modernist architecture in terms of its protection and recognition, as well as its importance for the Lithuanian nation during the inter-war period when the “true” Lithuanian capital – Vilnius – was part of Poland. The title of the UNESCO inscription is “Modernist Kaunas: Architecture of Optimism, 1919-1939”. Listen to the interview to find out more about what lies behind the inscription’s title and what this architecture means for the city today.