Current Issue
The protests against the mass falsification of the presidential election in Belarus in August 2020 and the subsequent brutal suppression of the general dissent against the announced results became an incredible shock for the Belarusian society. This shock caused a chain of significant changes in public life, one of which was the awakened interest in the historical past and national culture. In fact, today we are witnessing a reset of the Belarusian statehood. What it will be like tomorrow depends on how we reflex our identity and our place in space and time. All this makes the public discussion of Belarusian history and culture of particular importance culture is of particular importance. And in our opinion, it is the talk about heritage that forms the backbone of this discussion. After all, heritage is not old stones. They are the meanings we give to them. It's the meanings that we give them. They communicate not so much about the past as about the present and, more importantly, they project our future.
In this collection we thought it was especially important to actualize the European perspective of Belarusian culture and heritage, as well as to start a public reflection on the very concept of European heritage and the tools of working with it. European heritage and the tools of working with it. The European heritage is considered here in the context of three interrelated aspects:
- as an intellectual tradition that has become the foundation for the development of social and economic relations in Europe, as well as the basis of European urban culture;
- as a means of building a supranational political identity - one of the foundations of the European Union, which is realized in such programs as "European Heritage Label", "House of Europe", "Cultural Routes of the Council of Europe" and others;
- finally, as a set of the best approaches and practices of working with cultural heritage, developed in the leading countries of Europe and converted into academic programs, as well as national and international legal acts.
