070081 UE Guided Reading East European History - History of the heritage conservation movement (2022S)

Heritage conservation traditionally refers to the valorization of cultural material heritage, such as archaeological and architectural sites, as socially significant monuments, and to the initiatives undertaken for their preservation and integration into the new socio-cultural paradigms. Under the influence of the value of historicity, the late nineteenth century, and more so the twentieth century saw the institutionalization and the formation of veritable networks of heritage preservation. The history of architectural conservation sheds light on the partiality of the narratives about monuments and the symbolic values attached to their materiality in different historical contexts. The first part of the course will engage with the beginnings of the conceptualization of heritage as a “conservable” category and the history of heritage legislation. Students will be introduced to the global dimension of heritage studies through engagement with the topics of heritage protection in a colonial situation, emergence of national conservation schools, international conservation treaties, and the impact of the Second World War on heritage legislation worldwide.
The second part will offer insights into specific cases of different cultural practices of conservation and interpretation of monuments in the framework of critical heritage studies. These cases include nineteenth- and twentieth-century instances of monument conservation in the Russian Central Asia and Caucasus, in the Ottoman Balkans, in the post-Soviet space, in the armed conflicts in Yugoslavia an Iraq, and are aimed at increasing students’ familiarity with the history of European colonialism and with the nationalist rhetoric of material culture.