The Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum, located on a peninsula on the Danube in the vicinity of the Slovak capital of Bratislava, is one of the most stunning places created specifically for modern and contemporary art in Central Europe in the 21st century.

It was founded thanks to the determination of art dealer Vincent Polakovič and the involvement of Dutch investor Gerard Meulensteen. The building, resembling the shape of a Roman galley with oars, was designed by Slovak architect Peter Žalman.

The idea of a museum in the shape of a ship refers to its location – the Danube – which connects the countries of the region. It is especially symbolic in Čunovo, where the borders of Slovakia, Hungary and Austria meet.

Katarzyna Jagodzińska came to visit the museum in its jubilee year, 2025 – a quarter century after its opening – to learn how the place has rooted in this amazing spot. Her guide at the tour of the immense grounds of the museum is Michaela Simonova. The museum turns out to be an integral part of the green ecosystem – not only a place for art, but also leisure to enjoy Danube’s beauty accompanied by chirping birds on one of the many deckchairs.

For this episode of On The Road, we are in the Bulgarian Valley of the Roses and the town of Kazanlak to find out more about rose production.

John Beauchamp and Katarzyna Jagodzińska visit Kazanlak, where they meet Denitsa Barekova from the Rose Museum in Kazanlak, who explains the history of roses in the area and the traditional methods used to make coveted rose oil and other rose-related products.

Apart from the history and traditions of rose oil making, we also learn about the industry and as it stands now thanks to a meeting with Aleks at Lema, one of Kazanlak’s rose oil distilleries on the outskirts of town.

An ensemble of sculptures in the Romanian city of Târgu Jiu by renowned artist Constantin Brâncuși is now on the UNESCO Heritage List.

For this episode of Holistic Heritage, John Beauchamp and Dr Katarzyna Jagodzińska are in Târgu Jiu, where they take a look at the Brâncuși sculptures: the Table of Silence, Gate of the Kiss and perhaps the best known sculpture of the ensemble, the Endless Column.

We also visit the Deputy Mayor of Târgu Jiu Dr Adrian Tudor, who speaks about the process of getting Brâncuși’s ensemble onto the list and the city's plans regarding their new status as a UNESCO city since 2024. He is joined by colleague Oana Șomănescu, who kindly helped translate our conversation.

Muzeum Sztuki (literally “Art Museum” in Polish) is one of the first contemporary art museums in the world, and was conceived by renowned artist Władysław Strzemiński and created thank to the grassroots collection of art pieces from leading artists connected to Paris at that time.

Over decades the museum expanded, occupying three buildings connected to the textile industry which built the wealth and identity of Łódź. Even today, it remains one of the leading museums of modern and contemporary art, interconnected with major international institutions.

In this episode Katarzyna Jagodzińska and John Beachamp hold a meeting with Dr Leszek Karczewski, Deputy Director of the Muzeum Sztuki, to learn about coexistence of this “temple of art” with the capital of textile industry in the 20th and 21st centuries.

A background for the conversation is a participatory exhibition (“How the Museum Works”, 2025/2026) co-created by the entire team of the museum and mounted in the first museum building called ms1 located in the former palace of the owner of the Poznański textile enterprise, while the whole story starts and ends in the gardens of the Herbst Palace, part of the Scheibler textile empire, winner of the Europa Nostra Award medal for conservation in 1990.

For this episode of Holistic Heritage, we meet the team at the Europa Nostra Heritage Hub for Central and Eastern Europe and take a look back at the first few years of the Kraków Hub and its activities.

Hosted by John Beauchamp and Dr Katarzyna Jagodzińska, Head of the Europa Nostra Heritage Hub in Kraków. Also featured in the episode are Deputy Head of the Europa Nostra Heritage Hub in Kraków, Dr Joanna Sanetra-Szeliga, and Communications Manager Łukasz Pieróg.

The Europa Nostra Heritage Hub in Kraków was established in July 2022, hitting the ground running to increase awareness of heritage issues across the region. 

A major project undertaken by the Heritage Hub in Kraków was the mapping of the NGO heritage sector in the CEE region. We also set up the Kraków Heritage Forum, a series of meetings for practitioners to discuss local matters, such as culinary traditions and the Fortress Kraków network of forts surrounding the city.

We also discuss how our podcasts are a great tool to communicate our activities and the regional heritage ecosystem to a global audience.

In the episode, you can hear excerpts of soundscapes recorded while travelling across the region:

1. Organ interlude at St. Mary’s Basilica in Kraków, home of the Wit Stwosz alterpiece which won a European Heritage Award / Europa Nostra Award in 2023.
2. Walking the Via Transilvanica hiking trail near Piatra Fântânele in Romania, summer 2024.
3. A crackling fire opens the Łemkowska Watra festival in southern Poland in July 2024.
4. Urban soundscape of the city of Lviv, western Ukraine, April 2024.
5. Mining machinery in operation at the Queen Luiza Adit mine in Zabrze, Poland, early 2025.
6. Onboard a vaporetto in the Italian city of Venice on the occasion of the European Cultural Heritage Summit in September 2023.
7. The snap and crackle of wicker weaving at the Serfenta Association in Cieszyn, Poland, April 2025.
8. Mechanical looms being operated at the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź, June 2025.
9. A thunderstorm in the Beskid highland village of Nowica, summer 2024.
10. The Polish-Ukrainian folk band “Hraybery” play in the south-eastern border town of Przemyśl, summer 2024.

In this edition of Holistic Heritage, we speak to three heritage practitioners in Poland’s southern city of Kraków and what makes this city so special in terms of creating and running cultural heritage projects.

Join hosts John Beauchamp and Dr Katarzyna Jagodzińska, Head of the Europa Nostra Heritage Hub in Kraków, as they speak to Katarzyna Sosenko, an art historian and Chair of the Sosenko Family Collection Foundation, Artur Wabik, mural artist, curator and Chair of the Comic Museum Foundation in Kraków, and Krzysztof Żwirski, a long-term collaborator with the Kraków Municipality and mastermind behind numerous projects promoting cultural heritage in the city and beyond.

What makes Kraków such a special city to create and undertake cultural heritage projects? How does the city compare in terms of grass-roots movements and bottom-up initiatives? How does Kraków fare in comparison to other urban centres in the region? 

Find out more in the podcast – and also remember to download our latest report on the heritage-based third sector in the CEE region! 

Over the past couple of years, the research team at the Europa Nostra Heritage Hub in Kraków has been busy on creating a report on the non-governmental heritage sector in Central and Eastern Europe.

“Mapping of the Central and Eastern European Non-Governmental Heritage Sector: Report” was published in June 2025 and penned by researchers at the Europa Nostra Heritage Hub in Kraków in collaboration with the Centrum Cyfrowe Foundation in Warsaw.

The report is the first of its kind, giving a comprehensive overview of the non-governmental heritage sector across ten countries in the region. The document – containing over 200 pages – highlights the situation of the sector as well as the challenges it faces.

As many as 35,000 heritage NGOs are operational across the CEE region, the report finds, although working conditions leave a lot to be desired: the research reveals that problems regarding cashflow, operational stability and burnout are the three hardest challenges the sector faces.

The report shows findings from ten countries: Belarus, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine.

Three of the report’s authors: Dr Katarzyna Jagodzińska (Head of the Europa Nostra Heritage Hub in Kraków), Dr Joanna Sanetra-Szeliga (Deputy Head of the Europa Nostra Heritage Hub in Kraków), and Maja Drabczyk (Chair of the Centrum Cyfrowe Foundation in Warsaw), join podcast host John Beauchamp to discuss the report’s findings.

You can download a copy of the report from the Kraków Heritage Hub’s website by going here.

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.

In this edition of Holistic Heritage, we are both in Kraków and further afield for the Małopolska Culture Heritage Days 2025, run by the Małopolska Cultural Institute, which this year won a European Heritage Award / Europa Nostra Awardin the Citizens Engagement and Awareness-raising category.

In the episode, join John Beauchamp and head of the Europa Nostra Heritage Hub, Dr Katarzyna Jagodzińska as they explore three places on the 2025 Heritage Days trail in Małopolska.

This year’s theme is “light”: we visit the cozy village of Zakrzów, some 30km from Kraków near Niepołomice. It is there we go to the Zagroda Apolonia, where a determined Elżbieta Graboś is rebuilding a traditional hut after a fire destroyed the roof in 2023. 

At the zagroda (homestead) we also meet veterinarian and fantasy writer Radek Rak who authored a book commissioned by MIK for this 27th edition of the event.

In Kraków, right off the Main Market Square on we visit the Sperling tenement house on Sławkowska Street. There, we meet Christian and Véronique Leprette, the grandchildren of the former owners of the building, and Katarzyna Łomnicka, an art historian and curator of an exhibition on show at the house with paintings by Maria Sperling and Józef Jarema.

We also spend time at the Jerzmanowski Palace in Kraków’s Prokocim district. 

Throughout the episode, we meet some of the Culture Heritage Days team from MIK, including: Joanna Nowostawska-Gyalókay, Małgorzata Hordyniec and Dominika Mietelska-Jarecka.

What is a post-museum? Is museum participation really all that it’s geared up to be? How can museums – seen as gatekeepers of knowledge – really open up their collections and programming to the public? Or maybe they shouldn’t?

“In the book I show that museums are overusing the word participation, that they're inviting people to do collaborate and contribute while keeping their authoritarian position,” says Jagodzińska.

“But even if that is so, it is wonderful that more and more museums are deciding to open up, breaking from their traditional way of functioning, to leave their buildings and go beyond the museum walls,” she continues, sitting in the luscious grounds of the Royal Łazienki Museum in the centre of Warsaw.

The book was published by Routledge in 2025.

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.

The latest mapping of the heritage NGO sector in Central and Eastern Europe, conducted by the Europa Nostra Heritage Hub in Kraków (to be published in June 2025), has shown that heritage practitioners and others working in the sector often suffer from stress and burnout. This is of course a wider trend across society. 

How can we slow down and find our balance? Can heritage be the answer? 

We ask the Cieszyn-based Serfenta Association, whose Craft Revitalisation Model earned them a European Heritage Award / Europa Nostra Award in 2024, how to take things slow and whether traditional basket weaving is the answer for stressed-out urbanites in need of rest.

John Beauchamp and Katarzyna Jagodzińska speak to Paulina Adamska, Łucja Cieślar and Urszula Szwed from the Serfenta Association at the headquarters in Cieszyn.

“When the hands are working, the head is resting,” says Łucja Cieślar, one of the Serfenta team. During the podcast, she rustles various types of reeds and straw for your ASMR listening pleasure!

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.