Paper short abstract:

The paper address the issue of heritage in Czech borderland regions which were repopulated after WWII. Based on analysis of villages' representations created for national competition Village of the Year, we ask how heritage is negotiated in relation to displacement and repopulation.

Paper long abstract:

Each year since 1995 Ministry of Regional Development of the Czech Republic announce national competition Village of the Year and each year around 200 villages from all over the Bohemia and Moravia choose to participate. Competing villages employ various strategies to create a representation which conforms to deterritorialized and reterritorialized "pop-rurality", in which local heritage practices are supposed to be shared by all villagers.

However, many of competing villages are located in the borderlands from which German-speaking population was displaced after the WWII and which was then repopulated by new inhabitants, where heritage might be highly contested ground.

In our paper, based on analysis of representations created by borderland villages for the Competition, we will address the issue of heritage in such borderland regions. We are asking the question of how heritage in promoted, managed and preserved in the context of representation of the village for the Competition in the region with discontinuity of inhabiting population. How is the heritage understood in relation to displacement and repopulation? What kind of heritage is represented and by what means? And what heritage practices are employed in this context?