HOLISTIC HERITAGE

December 2022 marked the reopening of the Slovak National Gallery after major reconstruction. Our guide to the newly opened building is Alexandra Kusá PhD, its general director and a specialist in 20th century art.

In this episode, we speak to one of European heritage’s most revered practitioners, Professor Jacek Purchla.

In this new series from the Europa Nostra Heritage Hub in Kraków, we’ll be travelling to bring you in-depth and sound rich stories on heritage from Central and Eastern Europe.

One of the most important activities in heritage research is not just looking at the past, but recording the present for future generations of citizens and scholars. This is exactly what Dr Iryna Sklokina is doing from the Center for Urban History in Lviv. One of the centre’s projects is „Un-archiving Post-industry”, which digitally preserves endangered industrial heritage collections in Ukraine’s East.

The number of cultural heritage sites in Ukraine is huge, yet with local municipalities struggling to finance the upkeep of buildings, monuments and other treasures, new ways of financing have had to be found. That is where Spadshchyna.UA – which means ‘heritage’ in Ukrainian – comes into play.

In this episode, we are in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv to meet renowned historian and public intellectual Professor Yaroslav Hrytsak. He speaks about how Europe must realise the importance of Ukraine in the European cultural landscape despite it being on the periphery.