Urban Conservation and Political Legitimacy in Socialist Poland. The Case of the Historic Center of Kraków (1945–1978)

Abstract

The historic center of Kraków in the Polish People’s Republic was the first European urban quarter listed as a World Heritage Site in 1978. Its winding road to global recognition after 1945 is a salient illustration of how the socialist authorities in Poland understood the political role of material heritage throughout the period. The process of growing recognition for the historic center as an area deserving special treatment and comprehensive conservation took place in accordance with the logic of political centralization. The idea of the restoration of the historic center of Kraków, originating in the early 1950s, was a direct response to the advancing centralization of the state, affecting the cultural and, above all, symbolic role of
this city in post-war Poland. The central government’s initial absorption with reconstructing Warsaw, Poland’s capital, and building Nowa Huta (the new Kraków) evidently compromised the needs of the old Kraków. It also urged the local socialist elite to develop specific heritage preservation strategies to draw the attention of their political superiors. However,
the success of the idea was possible only after its takeover by a centralized state. The urban heritage of the former capital proved attractive to the central government at the beginning of the 1960s because of the celebrations of Poland’s millennium. The preserved material heritage of Kraków became then a symbol of the centuries-old state, to some extent a historical equivalent of rebuilt Warsaw, which was a symbol of modern (socialist) Poland. It may be argued that the political history of the conservation of the Kraków historic center in the post-war period essentially reflects the influence of centralization on the socialist politics of history in post-war Poland.