The team overseen by the state-run Polonika National Institute of Polish Cultural Heritage Abroad helps maintain 63 cemeteries in countries including Ukraine, Latvia, Romania, France and Britain under its strategic "Protection" programme, state news agency PAP reported.
This year alone, Polonika carried out heritage protection projects at 11 cemeteries holding the remains of Poles in France, Latvia and Ukraine, according to the PAP news agency.
This included renovation work on the Les Champeaux cemetery in Montmorency near Paris, which holds the graves of famous Polish emigres, including the national bard Adam Mickiewicz, modernist painter Olga Boznańska, and one of the drafters of Poland’s landmark Constitution of May 3, 1791, Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, Polonika said.
The institute's art conservation experts have also renovated the graves of fighters in Poland’s 1830 November Uprising against Russia, at cemeteries in Nantes and Machecoul in France, the PAP news agency reported.
Experts are carrying out a five-year conservation project at the Lychakiv Cemetery in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, and at a unique 18th-century cemetery in Kremenets in western Ukraine, where many eminent Poles are buried, according to officials.
Meanwhile, renovation work is continuing at a Christian cemetery in Chernivtsi, southwestern Ukraine, and at the 19th-century Catholic St. Michael's Cemetery in Riga, Latvia, where there are graves of many outstanding Latvians of Polish descent, the PAP news agency reported.
Comprising a team of art restorers, historians, architects and archivists, Polonika aims to help protect Polish heritage and promote national culture worldwide.
The institute was set up by the Polish government in 2017.
(pm/gs)
Source: PAP, Polonika
