This book originated in a symposium on cultural heritage that took place in the National Gallery of Slovenia in Ljubljana in 2006. Its aim was to address the construction of heritage across a variety of contexts, with particular reference to its role in the formation of national identities. In itself this is a fairly familiar topic, but the majority of the contributions examined issues of heritage and heritage politics within Central and Eastern European contexts, an area which has enjoyed little critical analysis. Not only do the papers in this volume highlight cases which are thus fairly unfamiliar to wider audiences – the post-communist legacy of the mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov in Sofia, monuments in Hungary to the Treaty of Trianon or conflicts over the cultural identity of Gdańsk, to name a few examples – they also reveal the limitations of much critical heritage discourse as it has emerged over the past 20 or so years. In this introductory chapter, therefore, I shall sketch some of the ways in which consideration of the specificities of heritage in Central and Eastern Europe throws up important challenges for mainstream critical heritage discourse, in order to provide some kind of a framework for approaching the various examples presented by the authors here.

The Idea of a Critical Heritage Discourse

The notion of heritage or of its counterparts elsewhere (patrimoine in France, patrimonio in Italy and Spain or Kulturerbe in Germany and Austria) was born in the 19th century (Harvey 2008). It is widely accepted that as a product of modernity it emerged in response to the destabilising effects of modernisation, offering a temporal compass that could provide a framework of meaning within an increasing condition of spatio-temporal disorientation. Of course, it can be argued that classical antiquity performed a similar function, offering a cultural anchor that provided a secure point of reference, and indeed had done so since the Renaissance and, perhaps, even earlier. Yet classical culture was held to provide a universal set of norms, whereas the crucial aspect of heritage was its particularism; heritage consisted of our past, our tradition, our memories. Indeed, as Benedict Anderson indicates, the idea of nation is inextricably linked with notions of heritage, memory and tradition (Anderson 1991, 22).