The state historical policy and the default religious heritage in Poland: on introducing pagan heritage to the public sphere in Kraków

Abstract

The main premise of this article1 is that heritage-making involves religion and that nation-states refer to religious heritage when building projects of national identity (Astor, Burchardt, Griera 2017). Furthermore, religious heritage is shaped and used by politicians and culture participants to legitimize their agendas (De Cesari 2013). These processes take place on the state – mainly Roman Catholic – level as well as lower down – not only Catholic, forming a complicated, dynamic amalgam of identities, visions of history, and religions. To discern this entanglement, it is necessary to look at the relation between heritage and religion from two perspectives. This article is therefore divided into two main parts. The first describes the ties between historical policy, the memory complex, the construction of national heritage, and Roman Catholicism in Poland. The second focuses on the connections between heritage and religion, as exemplified in the organization of the Rękawka event in Kraków – a historical reenactment of early medieval Slavic rites (see Baraniecka-Olszewska 2016). I focus on this particular ethnographic fieldwork case in order to present grassroots attempts to introduce Pagan heritage to the public sphere. Heritage and religion are visibly intertwined in social practice. Many places of religious cult have the status of heritage sites, while many rituals are regarded as the cultural heritage of particular groups. Scholars have recently analyzed the relations between the two phenomena from different perspectives, such as creating identity through the heritagization of local cults (Isnart 2008), transforming religious buildings into heritage (Coleman, Bowman 2018), or conflicts arising from the process of the heritagization of religious spaces (Di Giovine 2015). Such approaches investigate particular cases with regard to their changes in situ, offering insights into specific instances