While cultural heritage is one of the most important elements of identity building for communities, modern political borders have not followed regional patterns of heritage created by nations, ethnic and religious communities. Instead of disputing the past, recent efforts focus on creating new heritage communities to safeguard and publicize remains of the past for the future, according to Jozsef Laszlovszky, professor in the Department of Medieval Studies and director of the Cultural Heritage Studies program, speaking at the program’s first-ever event June 4 at CEU.

“Heritage belongs to a certain community in a certain moment, but there are nations, cultures, religions, and ethnicities that all claim it,” Laszlovszky said at the event, entitled “Heritage without Frontiers: Heritage Community and New Publications on the Cultural Heritage in Central Europe.” “Instead of competing with each other, we should emphasize that all these groups have a responsibility, and then we can save more of this heritage.”
This is the cornerstone of the new two-year M.A. program officially known as Cultural Heritage Studies: Academic Research, Policy, and Management. The interdepartmental and inter-school program, initiated and administered by the Medieval Studies Department, recently received accreditation from the New York State Education Department. It is organized and developed by a program committee formed by faculty members from different academic disciplines and units related to cultural heritage, including historical studies, cultural anthropology and sociology, humanities, environmental studies and policy, public policy, and business and management studies. The first students will arrive in fall 2014 for an “exploratory year,” and the program expects to reach “full speed” in academic year 2015-16, Laszlovszky said.
The term “heritage community” can also be useful when attempting to translate the concept into daily management. There are already frameworks, organizations, tools, and funding available for this effort in Europe. Katalin Wollak, vice-president of the Gyula Forster National Centre for Cultural Heritage Management, outlined these, beginning with the Council of the European Union’s new, broader definition of cultural heritage, approved on May 20, 2014:
“Cultural heritage consists of the resources inherited from the past in all forms and aspects - tangible, intangible and digital (born digital and digitized), including monuments, sites, landscapes, skills, practices, knowledge and expressions of human creativity, as well as collections conserved and managed by public and private bodies such as museums, libraries and archives. It originates from the interaction between people and places through time and it is constantly evolving. These resources are of great value to society from a cultural, environmental, social and economic point of view and thus their sustainable management constitutes a strategic choice for the 21st century.”
This is a much broader definition than previous ones, which limited “heritage” to tangible items, and clearly indicated the value to the European Union of preservation and management, Wollak said. She went on to describe several new EU initiatives such as the European Heritage Label, and the inclusion of cultural heritage in the Horizon2020 funding program.
Several books were published in 2013 promoting this idea of the archaeological and built heritage of the Carpathian Basin in a number of languages, Laszlovszky said later, and attendees were invited to view the books following the lecture. The list of books is available at the link below. The Cultural Heritage Studies’ next event is June 11, entitled “Measuring Social and Economic Impacts of Cultural Heritage” and featuring Xavier Greffe, professor of economics at the University Paris I. For more information, see: http://www.ceu.hu/event/2014-06-11/measuring-social-and-economic-impacts-cultural-heritage.






