Who Owns Heritage? Local Communities and the Fight for Historical Monuments in the 19th and 20th Centuries
 – Conference Report

In his introductory remarks, the author outlined the conference's aims and rationale. As stated in the call for papers, the event sought to counterbalance the disproportionate attention that official actors have received in the histories of heritage preservation at the expense of communities who lived around, used, and interacted with historical monuments as part of their daily lives. Naturally, official actors where often more influential for the ways monuments were transformed physically and symbolically, most visible by being invested with national symbolism and promoted as national monuments. The "heritage experts" (Laurajane Smith) have also created the historical sources, leaving a good trail of written and visual documents that makes their thinking and actions possible to be reconstructed. Local communities on the other hand are largely absent from archival records. Their lack of rights and means to create and preserve archival records is only one way of how they have been historically silenced, besides dispossession, discrimination, abuses or ignorance.

This silence lies at the heart of the conference's central question – how can we recover the voices of those who lived alongside historical monuments, for example churchgoers, farmers, workers, custodians, local officials, non-human entities and better understand their roles in restoration, preservation, promotion, and the creation of heritage?

The author offered an initial set of answers by presenting examples from his own research. Local church representatives, priests or bishops, frequently collided with the state authorities over the restoration activities in the late 19th century. In the case of Curtea de Argeș church in Romania but also at other monuments, the local bishop criticised in several petitions to the government the activity of the state architects. His concern was not merely aesthetic but he rightly felt his authority threatened because the church was about to become not his and the community’s possession but a national monument, with different usage rules. Property-related conflicts also emerged in interwar Romania, where more and more local communities petitioned to demolish wooden churches in order to build new ones, requests that were opposed by heritage officials and the Commission for Historical Monuments.

These cases highlighted a key concept that persisted throughout the conference – ownership of historical monuments. Modernity and the nation-building period can indeed be understood as a struggle for ownership, namely states' efforts to control land, time, lives, and heritage. Frank Rochow illustrated this through the competing claims over the Kościuszko Mound, the prominent artificial hill in Kraków in the second half of the 19th century. While the Habsburg military envisioned a fort, the Kościuszko Committee sought to preserve the site as a monument, city authorities attempted to remain neutral, and local residents simply wished to use the land. Igor Vranić examined a similar conflict in Dalmatia, where heritage scholars attempted to acquire the early medieval Church of Saint Barbara in 1894 but encountered resistance from local stakeholders, even though these groups were often portrayed as indifferent to the monument's historical value. An even more explicit case of contested ownership was presented by Radu Remus Macovei, who discussed the physical removal of churches from Carpathian regions in interwar Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, and Romania for relocation to open-air museums. In his keynote lecture, Maximilian Hartmuth traced debates over monuments between Habsburg officials and local authorities, particularly municipalities.

Questions of ownership were revisited from a contemporary perspective on the second day. Barbora Vacková, Vladimír Holík and Jana Vlčková Musilová asked what it means today for individuals to "own" heritage buildings, and what obligations, tastes, and forms of education such ownership entails. Also from the standpoint of heritage advocacy, Raluca Maria Trifa addressed the neglect of industrial heritage in present-day Timișoara, Romania, contrasting it with the comparatively more successful case of Brno.

The keynote of Maximilian Hartmuth focused on a further fundamental aspect of heritage, its destruction and loss. It illustrated how cities across the Habsburg Monarchy demolished historic buildings to make way for roads or new developments, and how the debates surrounding such demolitions played a crucial role in the creation of heritage. The D-word (Frank Rochow) has been brought up again in the concluding discussions as a key trigger for a building to become heritage. The loss and anticipated loss of buildings were the very reasons for their listing as monuments and for debates over the significance of historical heritage that included local actors, as several papers illustrated. Aida Murtić examined debates surrounding the demolition of Sarajevo's Ottoman Tašlihan in 1912; Ümit Fırat Açıkgöz discussed reactions to the planned demolition of the Ibrahim Paşa Palace in Istanbul in 1933; Mihnea Mihail explored the significance of the demolition of medieval fortifications in Transylvania in the 19th and 20th centuries under different political contexts.

However, preservation alone is rarely sufficient to stop the disappearance of heritage. For buildings to survive, they have typically needed to retain a practical function. Cultural or nationalist arguments may be persuasive but use-value often proves decisive. Will McMahon was direct in his analysis of historic houses in Rosedale Abbey, England: "Heritage does imply the use of the buildings.” Alessia Giaquinto made a similar case for the continued use of the custodian houses of the Royal Palace of Caserta, Italy, warning that without function they risk becoming "useless houses." A different understanding of use emerged from Alexey Izosimov's paper on volunteer restoration work at the Solovetsky Monastery in the Soviet Union during the 1960s. There, sustained engagement with the monument's materiality, multisensory experience, and collective labour generated lasting social memory and meaning.

In the concluding discussions, participants considered how one might think beyond the capitalist idea of ownership and asked if someone has to own heritage? Therefore, circling back to the very title of this conference, they ended up contesting the very idea of ownership, after addressing the fight to possess heritage, demolish and use it. By critically thinking about ownership and use, one can make space for stories and actors that are otherwise excluded from the discussions about heritage, such as people who do not own or use but interact with heritage and also actors that cannot own heritage, such as non-human entities. Overall, as reflected in the program as well, the conference marked a strong starting point for ideas and themes that merit further development, and participants are currently exploring possibilities for one or more publications building on the papers delivered in Brno.