Heritage for the Future: Debating nation and legacies of the past in wartime Ukraine.

My research focuses on conflicts and contestations around built religious heritage and public space in Lviv, the largest city in Western Ukraine. Lviv, a former Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish city that was once part of Habsburg Galicia and Poland, became a Soviet city after World War II; its Jewish population perished in the Holocaust and in line with Stalinist demographic policies, Poles were deported. In the ethnically homogenous Ukrainian city that emerged the built heritage remained mostly intact, a testimony of the pre-war past.
Today much of the inner city is designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Besides legacies of a multiethnic past, Lviv is also the symbolic heartland of Ukrainians’ struggle for statehood, where anti-Soviet dissidence was strong and nationalist ideas retain strong purchase today. In the 2013 Euromaidan and the ensuing war Lviv has been a pro-European stronghold.
Heritage is a central political arena in Lviv. Polish, Jewish, Soviet and Ukrainian pasts are appropriated in the contemporary public life of the city in various, contested ways. Future aspirations, geopolitical belongings and identity politics are all orchestrated through heritage sites, memorials and museums. I examine ways municipal, state and non-governmental actors pursue their competing visions of the future in the management of these sites. How the past is curated often explicitly understood as a model for future policies and local acts placed in metonymic relationship with country-wide policies.
War escalates the stakes such conflicts claim, as many see the fragmentation of Ukraine as a product of insufficient integration and missed chances to solder conflicting legacies and loyalties together. The project therefore aims to interpret heritage conflicts in the context of the current political situation, tracing how the ongoing war redraws the landscape of cultural politics. I approach these conflicts from the perspective of local museum workers, civil servants, priests, academics and activists in order to analyse policy-making and urban development projects.
During my research I focused on three locations, corresponding to Jewish, Polish and Ukrainian ethno-religious pasts, each of which exemplifies a Soviet strategy of dealing with religion and ethnicity, regulating potentially problematic legacies. I traced the actors and organisations involved and located the ongoing conflicts in the broader cultural scene of the city. The resulting ethnography synthesises understandings of socio-political transformations, changing ideas of nation and history  and the role of the built environment shaping these processes.