Archival conferences

The 7th edition of the Heritage Forum of Central Europe is scheduled to take place from September 4th to 5th, 2024, at the premises of the International Cultural Centre in Kraków. Against the backdrop of the current situation in Ukraine and in commemoration of the anniversaries of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in Armed Conflict and the 1964 Venice Charter, this year's forum will convene under the theme "Responsibility & Renewal". Each day of the forum will focus on one of these themes, featuring three two-hour-long discussion panels and a keynote lecture.

The 6th Heritage Forum of  Central Europe was an international conference dedicated to discussing and analyzing the links and interdependencies between heritage and development.

The National Heritage Institute invited to the conference "Volunteering for heritage. Let's work together in Europe", organized together with the International Cultural Center in Krakow, the "To Protect Good" Foundation and European Heritage Volunteers.

Over the last two decades or so the links between heritage and environment, broadly understood as “that which surrounds”, have started to occupy a central position in the debate on human inheritance, both tangible and intangible. In the wake of the spatial turn that has prioritised the categories of place and space in social sciences and the humanities, as well as in view of some unprecedented global environmental challenges faced by humanity, heritage studies have become particularly concerned with an investigation of the reciprocity between heritage and environment, as well as their mutual engagement. 

The heritage of the Third Reich still remains a dissonant heritage. The Nazi Germany’s plans for conquest and Hitler’s extermination policy, which in Poland were directly linked with the occupant’s urban visions, were decisive in formulating a categorical assessment of the entire architectonic production of the Third Reich as the “heritage of hate”. However, this attitude should not translate into this subject matter being marginalised or ignored by scholars of 20th-century art in Poland. For understandable reasons, Polish researchers have for many years either entirely avoided or barely remarked on the problem of dissonant heritage. After many years, when emotions gradually cooled down, it has become possible to undertake thorough research on the heritage of the Third Reich. Moreover, this topic requires comprehensive investigations, critical analysis, and assessment.

On November 23 and 24, 2018, a conference to commemorate the 130th anniversary of the birth of Stanisław Vincenz, the author of the tetralogy "On the high mountain pasture" will be held in Krakow. The conference is to remind the timeless dimension of his work, its deep connection with the cultural landscape of the Carpathians and Central Europe and the humanistic idea of dialogue between cultures.

In 2011 the European Heritage Label (EHL) was established. This European Union initiative names monuments and sites which have the status of a European symbol and play a significant role in the history and culture of Europe or in building the European Union...

Registration for participants

The theme of the conference “Kraków and the World”, an anniversary symposium organised by the International Cultural Centre, was the phenomenon of the city – a topic which has intermittently occupied a very special place in the multifaceted reflection on heritage, identity and civilisation which has been the ICC’s mission since its inception on 29 May 1991.

The two-day conference attended by historians was an opportunity to compare various interpretations of Polish history.

Cities, as mirrors and hallmarks of our civilisation, some of the most spectacular human inventions, are phenomena which challenge full understanding. They are multilayered compositions of social interactions, economics, infrastructure and a growing number of inhabitants. As Jane Jacobs has said, they are a complex problem of interacting factors that are interrelated into an organic whole...

An international conference that summarises the research project “The Myth of Galicia” and the resulting exhibition under the same title, presented at the ICC Gallery. The invited Austrian, Polish, Ukrainian and American experts discussed the unceasing phenomenon of this already non-existent place, its multi-dimensionality, Galicia becoming a universal symbol for Poland, Austria, Israel, and especially contemporary Ukraine.

An international specialist conference on the subject of revindication of artworks in Poland in the European context. The tragedy of World War II brought the “relocation” of a vast number of artworks. The advent of Communism...

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the first free elections in Poland of the 4th June and the round anniversaries of the Polish accession to the European Union and of the creation of the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue Between Cultures (2004) became an exceptional occasion for the ICC in Cracow to organise an international congress...

In recent sociological and cultural research, the question of the crisis of memory is raised, which from its boom and spectacular growth has become dangerously out of control. In so far as the problem of collective memory, particularly the collective memory...

The first in a series of meetings initiated by the non-governmental organisation Via Cultura from Bratislava. Each meeting discusses the accrued “baggage” of the past which the countries of Central Europe face in the present day...