The event features a series of panel discussions covering a wide range of topics, such as postwar heritage renewal in Ukraine, international criminal responsibility for crimes against cultural heritage, and structural transformations in heritage stewardship across Central Europe over the past three decades.
Other topics include the role of heritage in revitalizing communities, fostering identity, and driving economic benefits such as tourism, job creation and local development.
All these topics will be discussed in the context of Russia's war against Ukraine.
Ukrainian speakers at the conference include Roman Shpyrka, an advisor to the country's prosecutor-general, Sofia Dyak from the Center for Urban History in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, and Oleksandra Kovalchuk from the Odesa National Fine Arts Museum.
The event is also expected to be attended by researchers and experts from Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Lithuania, Hungary, Germany and Belgium.
The programme of the conference includes a tour of the Odesa: The Long 20th Century in Art exhibition at Kraków’s International Cultural Centre.
The exhibition traces the most important political and cultural events in the history of Ukraine's Odesa from the 19th century onward.
The Heritage Forum of Central Europe, now in its seventh edition, was launched in 2011. The conference is organized and hosted by the International Cultural Centre, the coordinator of a cultural heritage task force as part of the Visegrad Group of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary.
The Responsibility & Renewal conference runs until Friday.
(mk/gs)