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Tag: heritage

Goodbye communism

The pace of dealing with the communist past has been uneven across Central and Eastern Europe. While Poland intensely debated de-communization in the 1990s, in Ukraine the mass removals of Lenin monuments – the so-called Leninopad – began only during the Revolution of Dignity in 2014. In the Baltic states, the memory of communism remains strongly negative.

December 8, 2025 - Kinga Gajda Michał Kuryłowicz

From revolution to souvenirs

The selling of communism across Central and Eastern Europe reveals more than the region’s ingenuity in repurposing its past – it exposes how memory itself has become a currency in the post-socialist era. This marketplace of memory is not merely a tourist trend – it is a mirror of broader cultural transformations.

December 8, 2025 - Jovana Janinovic

Sensory memory and creating a community of memory

The feeling of coarse toilet paper bought after hours in a queue, the scent of sweat on a train to a Bulgarian summer camp, the fizz of Soviet shampanskoye igristoye on New Year’s Eve – these are not just fragments of nostalgia. They are traces of a collective past, an embodied memory of life under communism that continues to shape how a generation remembers itself.

December 8, 2025 - Magdalena Banaszkiewicz

The memory of forgetting

After the end of communist rule, many societies sought recognition of their own wartime suffering as part of Europe’s shared memory. Although the Allies are often portrayed as a united front against Nazism, the newer member states of the European Union have pressed for acknowledgement of the oppression they experienced under both Nazism and Stalinism, arguing that these histories should be remembered on equal terms.

December 8, 2025 - Dymitr Romanowski

Rediscovering the People’s Poland

In Poland, after the initial rejection of the legacy of the Polish People’s Republic, a gradual re-evaluation of the communist period has begun. Certain elements of its social reality – those that gave it a distinct local colour and a sense of belonging – came to be reassessed and, in some cases, appreciated.

December 8, 2025 - Elżbieta Żak

Looking for heroes. Experiences in Latvia

Latvia’s understanding of heroism has been rewritten repeatedly over the past century, shaped in turn by Soviet occupation, the struggle for independence and the challenges of democratic renewal. Each era constructed its heroes – some imposed, some rediscovered, others newly recognised. Today, debates over memory, justice and national identity continue to determine which lives are honoured and which stories are told.

December 8, 2025 - Vita Zelče

Lithuania’s memory of communism

The opening of Grūtas Park, an open-air museum with statues from the Soviet era, in 2001 provoked considerable public debate, with leading politicians expressing both strong support and firm opposition. The arguments on both sides revealed a deeper societal divide over how to evaluate – and what to do with – the heritage of communism.

December 8, 2025 - Paweł Plichta

I grew up hearing Ukraine’s village songs. Now we are helping young people bring them back.

A grassroots project is working to revive the dialects and folk traditions that have all but disappeared from rural Ukraine.

May 21, 2025 - Yuri Bilinsky

The abandoned homes of Poland’s most tourist-heavy region

Decades ago, Poles from the Podhale region flocked to the US in droves. But even those who never planned to return still refuse to give up their homes.

May 9, 2023 - Katarzyna Skiba

Civil society steps in to preserve Romania’s past

In Romania, despite a lack of political will, civil society is racing to save dilapidated old structures and help ensure the survival of the region's unique identity. Yet, will their efforts be enough to save the thousands of heritage sites across the country?

A dozen-strong group of volunteers gather at the stone base of a fortified Lutheran church in the small Saxon village of Filetelnic, Transylvania, as Eugen Vaida, head of the Ambulanta Pentru Monumente (Ambulance for Monuments), gives directions on how to save one of the church’s three-metre-high fortified walls. The wall, part of which dates back to the 15th century, is crumbling from the top down as a result of water infiltration. This would eventually destroy the wall, as well as the ancient inscriptions on it, which date back to the 16th and 17th centuries.

Sadly, Filetelnic is not a unique case. Many heritage buildings throughout this region have fallen into various states of disrepair, from crumbling medieval fortified churches to abandoned Hungarian castles, from old war monuments to centuries-old Saxon homes.

January 2, 2018 - Stephen McGrath

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