Ukraine Heritage Spotlight: Creating a cultural heritage market

The number of cultural heritage sites in Ukraine is huge, yet with local municipalities struggling to finance the upkeep of buildings, monuments and other treasures, new ways of financing have had to be found.That is where Spadshchyna.UA – which means ‘heritage’ in Ukrainian – comes into play. The NGO was set up to raise awareness of cultural heritage in Ukraine as well as become a first point of call for interested investors, of which there are more and more.“The war raised in us an understanding and the value of our identity,” says Hanna Havryliv from Spadshchyna.UA, adding that especially in western Ukraine – which was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – people with Polish, German, Jewish and Armenian roots have also taken an interest in buying old properties which need restoration.Since Spadshchyna.UA was launched in 2016 there has been a great interest in Ukrainian cultural heritage, but after the war started a lot of NGOs simply vanished due in part to a lack of funding. However, those which had implemented successful programmes have managed to stay afloat.Now “we have a new stage of cultural heritage NGOs in Ukraine which work more effectively, sustainably, [and] more professionally,” Havryliv underlines.Hanna Havryliv spoke to Katarzyna Jagodzińska, head of the Europa Nostra Heritage Hub in Kraków, as well as John Beauchamp and Artur Wabik on the importance of turning Ukraine’s cultural heritage into a patriotic profit-making exercise. This podcast was produced in the frame of and as an outcome of the European Heritage Hub pilot project co-funded by the European Union.