Six innovative cultural projects won the 2022 European Heritage Awards

The people’s choice award this year went to a Ukrainian project celebrating the vyshyvanka shirt

Yesterday, during a special ceremony in Prague’s iconic State Opera House, Europa Nostra announced the winners of the 2022 European Heritage Awards. This year, the organisation handed out prizes in five categories, with one people’s choice award.

The winning projects all focus on advancing and preserving unique instances of European heritage and were chosen from a list of 30 outstanding heritage achievements, from 18 European countries. Apart from the award, laureates also received a monetary grant of 10,000 euros to help grow their initiatives in the future.

New techniques for heritage projects

Culture, and the way people interact with it, is changing. Especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, digital access has increasingly become a mandatory part of experiencing culture. Accordingly, many of the projects that won the 2022 European Heritage Award focused on introducing digital tools to increase access to heritage.

For example, the project that won the prize for Innovation featured Horizon 2020 research, using intelligent computational systems to better understand Europe’s silk heritage. The project is called Silknow and is led by a team from France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Slovenia and Spain.

Furthermore, the laureate for Digital Transformation is a project called Symphony from Spain and it focused on creating an immersive audio-visual experience, raising awareness of classical music. The project aimed at using state-of-the-art tech to expose a younger demographic to classical music.

Also, the laureate for Sustainability and Climate Action is an Italian project called Va’ Sentiero, which tries to document the entire Sentiero Italia route. The route is around 8,000 kilometres long and is the longest hiking route in the world. The project took three years and over 3,000 participants to slowly capture the landscape of the natural heritage site.

Additionally, the prize for Social Cohesion and Wellbeing was handed to a project called The Rivers of Sofia, from Bulgaria. The project itself tries to use pop-up architecture to draw attention to the neglected artificial riverbeds in Bulgaria’s capital and transform them into a brand new public space.

The last prize was for International Relations, which was awarded to Costa Carras from Greece, posthumously. For over 50 years, Carras worked to create a sustainable link and appreciation of culture as a conservationist and historian.

The people’s choice award

For the first time this year, the people’s choice award also featured a monetary award and this year over 11,000 people voted, ultimately choosing a Ukrainian project for the top spot.

The project is called World Vyshyvanka Day, an annual holiday celebrated worldwide celebrating Ukrainian embroidered shirts (vyshyvanka) as an important element of the heritage of the Ukrainian people.