Main Tendencies in the Approach Towards Built Heritage in Communist Poland / Tendinţe principale în abordarea patrimoniului construit în Polonia comunistă (original) (raw)
Related papers
The protection and guardianship of cultural heritage in Poland.pdf
The protection and guardianship of cultural heritage in Poland / Opieka i ochrona dziedzictwa kulturowego na ziemiach Polski Polish - English article presenting briefly the most important issues in the history of heritage protection in Polish territories in a chronological order. The full version of the magazine is available at https://www.nid.pl/pl/Dla\_specjalistow/Wydawnictwa/wydanie.php?ID=372
Committees of international experts and sites of national martyrdom: Socialist Poland's contribution to the early World Heritage Program The paper investigates the role of Polish institutions and experts participating in UNESCO's new program on "World Heritage" in the 1970s and 1980s and the ways in which socialist conceptions of heritage were employed in a transnational context: After the UNESCO World Heritage Convention was passed in 1972, Poland was among the driving forces of the World Heritage Committee and initial nominating parties to the respective List. At the first opportunity in 1978, Poland nominated not only the city centres of Krakow and Warsaw, Wieliczka Salt Mine and Białowieża National Park, but also Auschwitz-Birkenau as World Heritage. Settled in this context of the portfolio of the People's Republic's five early World Heritage contributions, the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau will serve as a case study, how the socialist as well as national interpretations of heritage of this place of "national martyrdom" were interpreted in a transnational context. The former concentration camp, at the same time perceived as authentic relic landscape, Memorial and Museum, immediately raised discussions within the World Heritage Committee. Finally, the inclusion of – as they were then labelled – "negative historical values" into the World Heritage conception was accepted in 1979. However, the discourse on sites solely added for historical meaning and not for their perceived material value stayed with this program for decades to come. I argue that the inclusion of Auschwitz and the other early Polish sites into World Heritage can serve not only to reveal allocations of meaning to heritage in Socialist Poland. It also translates them onto a transnational level, where these notions are integrated, rejected or re-interpreted. At the same time, these processes shed light on the changing concepts, political agendas and interactions of Polish heritage experts and of the Socialist state administration within the framework of UNESCO, ICOMOS, and other international organizations. Talk in the frame of the Workshop: Heritage Studies and Socialism: Transnational Perspectives on Heritage in Eastern and Central Europe Organizers: Eszter Gantner, Herder Institute Marburg; Corinne Geering / Paul Vickers, International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, Gießen November 23–25 2016
2017 Contextualizing the heritage of the communist regime in Poland: new narratives
Preserving transcultural heritage: your way or my way? Questions on authenticity, identity and patrimonial proceedings in the safeguarding of architectural heritage created in the meeting of cultures, ed. Joaquim Rodrigues dos Santos, pp. 429-438, 2017
This article concerns the recent strategies adopted to deal with the heritage of Polish culture from the communist period. These strategies include: a growing interest from the point of view of monument protection authorities and artistic associations in the architecture of the Polish People's Republic, the educational activities of newly-established thematic museums and commercial events that invoke nostalgia for the past. After 1989 the problem of the presence of symbols of Soviet domination emerged, many of them have been systematically removed from the landscape, yet the issue of their future has maintained its importance. This issue leads to the question of a moral assessment of architectonic heritage.
Future of the Past. Heritage and economy in Poland in the first half of the 21st century.
2015
This conceptual article concerns the possible future role that heritage might play in Polish economy in the first half of the 21st century. By applying critical literature analysis, it provides an overview of the historical progress of the heritage values debate in the Western world, and compares it with recent advances in a similar debate that was triggered in Poland by the political and socio-economic changes after year 1989. The resulting observations serve as a basis for an attempt to forecast possible future directions in which it can be reasonably expected that the economic aspects of the heritage discourse in Poland will develop. The article assumes that the development process will not be substantially unlike what has already taken place in those parts of the developed world that could begin the heritage debate earlier than Poland, and that it will be invariably informed by largely the same body of international treaties and theories concerning heritage and culture in general. However, new contributing factors are also considered, namely that the process will take place in an increasingly challenging economic environment. The forecast proposed is therefore a hypothetical, tentative, but theoretically informed scenario that can be treated as a non-standard, complementary argument in the ongoing heritage debate.
Ochrona Dziedzictwa Kulturowego, 2020
From the doctrinal take, ruin is perceived as a full-fledged historical monument representing autonomous values. Highly polemic against the doctrine and theory is the practice expressed in concrete interventions in the substance and surroundings of a historical monument. It can thus be stated that the entire post-war period was one of affirmation and praise of the Rebuilding/ Reconstruction/Restoration project. The Rebuild slogan has taken root as a positive and creative idea. In order to implement the doctrinal concept of the protection of ruins, there is a purpose behind restoring the social skill of perceiving the beauty of historical ruins as signs in the landscape. And, there is a purpose in educating the community in terms of to what extent ruins, without a useful function of their own, may be useful or useable anyway – as a regional attraction, a imagination-inspiring magnet attracting tourists. This poses a considerable challenge to experts in cultural goods protection: not only should they demonstrate an in-depth recognition of restoration/conservation doctrines but also render themselves acquainted with information, educational, and negotiation techniques – in order to contribute to the decisions regarding the lot of historical monuments, historical ruins in particular.