Heritage, Landscape and Identity: Arqus Students Explore Europe’s Contested Pasts in Vilnius

What makes cultural heritage dissonant? Who decides which traces of the past remain visible and which disappear? These questions were at the heart of the Spring School “Dissonant Heritage, Contested Landscapes and European Identity”, held in early June at Vilnius University. Over four intensive days, 30 students and doctoral researchers from six Arqus partner universities explored how Europe’s contested pasts are written into its landscapes – and what this means for how European identity is understood today.

Organised by the Arqus Working Group “Living Labs: European Heritage”, led by Prof. Marija Drėmaitė from Vilnius University, Dr Steffi Marung and Dr Janine Kläge from Leipzig University, the Spring School brought together Master’s and PhD students from Leipzig, Maynooth, Minho, Padua, Vilnius and Wrocław. The group represented a wide range of disciplines – from art history and cultural studies to political science, urban studies and mobility research – as well as diverse academic perspectives and personal backgrounds.

The intensive programme was hosted and organised by Vilnius University’s Faculty of History and its (Post)Authoritarian Landscapes Research Centre (PAScapes). Vilnius itself, however, was more than a backdrop. It became a living laboratory for the themes the Spring School set out to examine.

From the Seminar Room to the City

The programme unfolded across several thematic areas, moving between lectures, discussions and field visits. The first part focused on dissonant heritage at universities. Prof. Giuliana Tomasella from the University of Padua examined how universities navigate their own troubled legacies, while Prof. David Martín López from the University of Granada explored the legacy of Iberian dictatorships in Spanish and Portuguese cityscapes, as well as their colonial heritage.

The discussion then turned to socialist built landscapes, with a keynote lecture by Prof. Arnold Bartetzky from Leipzig University on how socialist architectural heritage is perceived, transformed and contested across Central and Eastern Europe. In the afternoon, participants continued their work in the field, visiting Lazdynai, Vilnius’s landmark socialist housing district.

For many participants, the fieldwork was one of the moments when theoretical discussions became directly connected to the city around them. Anastasia Donatelli, Arqus Ambassador at the University of Padua, said that seeing the studied material in person helped reveal the complexity of this heritage:

“Seeing the socialist architecture analysed in class made the concepts tangible and revealed their complex legacy. Being part of the Arqus Alliance made me realise how lucky we are to participate in such impactful initiatives.”

The visit to Lazdynai also opened up wider conversations about how different European societies remember, reinterpret or sometimes avoid their twentieth-century pasts. The same places could be read through architectural, political, social and personal lenses, showing that contested heritage rarely has a single meaning.

Chisoka Simões, a doctoral researcher at the University of Minho, reflected on how the Spring School made visible both differences and shared challenges across Europe:

“My highlight was seeing both tensions and convergences in interpretations of 20th-century Europe shaped by authoritarian regimes. Coming from Portugal’s imperial, colonial and fascist past, I reflected on the hegemonic effects of different regimes, including communist ones. In a few days, we exchanged problems and tools – and possible solutions – confirming both the scale of our tasks and the fact that Europe’s cultural dissonances remain a shared challenge.”

The next part of the programme shifted the focus to post-Holocaust landscapes. Introductions by researchers from PAScapes were combined with fieldwork at the former Vilnius Ghetto and the Lost Shtetl Museum in Šeduva – sites where traces of Jewish life remain both present and often overlooked.

These visits added another layer to the Spring School’s central questions. They invited participants to consider not only what is preserved, but also what has been erased, silenced or made difficult to see in the contemporary landscape.

For Dimitrios Roupas, a doctoral researcher from Maynooth University, the field visits were closely connected to his research interests:

“As a Holocaust researcher, experiencing these sites first-hand deepened my understanding of how memory, landscape and heritage interact. Walking through spaces where traces of Jewish life remain visible yet often overlooked prompted me to reflect on remembrance, commemoration and the ways difficult histories can be both present and hidden.”

The week concluded with a roundtable discussion, “Critical Heritage Studies – Future Pathways in Cross-Regional Perspectives”, led by Dr Steffi Marung, Prof. Marija Drėmaitė and Dr Janine Kläge. The discussion brought together the main themes of the preceding days while also opening new questions for future collaboration.

Prof. Marija Drėmaitė, Professor of Architectural History and Cultural Heritage at Vilnius University, emphasised that the Spring School revealed how widely shared these questions are across Europe:

“Lectures, discussions and excursions revealed just how important historical memory and heritage sites associated with a traumatic or unwanted past are, and how characteristic they are of all European countries. Every country and region experienced events in the twentieth century whose memory was complicated and changed as political regimes changed.”

European Identity as a Living Conversation

The Spring School demonstrated something that reaches beyond its own programme. The Arqus Alliance is built on the premise that the diversity of its members’ histories is not a complication to be managed, but one of its core strengths. The universities that make up Arqus bring a unique combination of historical experiences to the table: post-socialist and post-fascist legacies, post-colonial heritage, and the perspectives of institutions that have themselves lived through historical ruptures which European heritage discourse still struggles to fully accommodate.

Bringing these perspectives together created the conditions for the kind of critical, comparative conversation that took place in Vilnius: in historic seminar rooms, on busy street corners in residential districts, in the silence of the former Vilnius Ghetto and on a bus to a small Lithuanian town where an entire Jewish community was brutally erased 85 years ago.

Samet Kayar, doctoral researcher and Arqus Ambassador at the University of Wrocław, described the experience as a reminder that European identity is not fixed, but constantly negotiated:

“Personally, the most rewarding part was discussing these contested landscapes on-site with international colleagues. This showed me empirically that European identity is not a static concept, but a continuous dialogue shaped by how we interpret these physical symbols of history.”

Europe’s heritage is vast, layered and far from settled – and the Spring School in Vilnius was only one chapter. Building on the discussions and student input gathered throughout the week, the Arqus Working Group is already planning further joint teaching formats on cultural heritage. As the week made clear, the sites, stories and perspectives still to be explored are effectively without limit. The work has only begun.