Go backCultural Guardians: A Cross-Border Cultural Heritage Program
September 2026
Empowering Polish, Ukrainian, and German Museum Professionals Against Disinformation
This year, our focus is on crisis management, digitization, and education. The project involves two target groups: a Polish-Ukrainian group in Germany and a second group in Warsaw
The program will conclude on September 18 at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin with the debate Culture vs. Disinformation, featuring a panel discussion on “How to Build Trust? Museums in the Age of Hybrid Warfare”
The draft agenda and event registration are available via the link:
https://forms.gle/fdxwsKUDNRwDqJHZ8
This year, our focus is on crisis management, digitization, and education. The project involves two target groups: a Polish-Ukrainian group in Germany and a second group in Warsaw
The program will conclude on September 18 at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin with the debate Culture vs. Disinformation, featuring a panel discussion on “How to Build Trust? Museums in the Age of Hybrid Warfare”
The draft agenda and event registration are available via the link:
https://forms.gle/fdxwsKUDNRwDqJHZ8
About Cultural Guardians
The loss of Ukrainian cultural assets is not merely collateral damage of Russia's war of aggression. On the contrary, the destruction of Ukrainian tangible and intangible culture is a strategic goal of Putin's. Museums, monument preservation, and other forms of cultural heritage protection therefore play an essential role in Ukraine, both in safeguarding cultural artifacts and in dealing with memories and cultural narratives during and after the current war situation. Particularly in eastern Ukraine and in smaller museums outside the major cities, cultural workers often lack the expertise to deal with this situation. In the area of monument preservation, robust structures are entirely absent.
This is where Cultural Guardians: A Cross-Border Cultural Heritage Program comes in. With a strong coalition of project partners, Cultural Guardians offers a capacity-building format that invites employees from cultural heritage institutions to Poland and Germany for knowledge exchange, creating added value for all involved. In a structured program, cultural workers from Ukraine will learn both practical and theoretical approaches to dealing with conflict-laden history in a museum context and in monument preservation in both countries. German and Polish partners will also have the opportunity to learn from the Ukrainian participants and apply their experiences with resilience building to their own contexts. The program's target groups include employees in museums, monument preservation, and archives, as well as in related projects, but also students and academics from various disciplines. The goal is to build a strong Ukrainian-Polish-German alumni network to strengthen cooperation and competence transfer in the fields of museums, monument preservation, archives, and related institutions.
The loss of Ukrainian cultural assets is not merely collateral damage of Russia's war of aggression. On the contrary, the destruction of Ukrainian tangible and intangible culture is a strategic goal of Putin's. Museums, monument preservation, and other forms of cultural heritage protection therefore play an essential role in Ukraine, both in safeguarding cultural artifacts and in dealing with memories and cultural narratives during and after the current war situation. Particularly in eastern Ukraine and in smaller museums outside the major cities, cultural workers often lack the expertise to deal with this situation. In the area of monument preservation, robust structures are entirely absent.
This is where Cultural Guardians: A Cross-Border Cultural Heritage Program comes in. With a strong coalition of project partners, Cultural Guardians offers a capacity-building format that invites employees from cultural heritage institutions to Poland and Germany for knowledge exchange, creating added value for all involved. In a structured program, cultural workers from Ukraine will learn both practical and theoretical approaches to dealing with conflict-laden history in a museum context and in monument preservation in both countries. German and Polish partners will also have the opportunity to learn from the Ukrainian participants and apply their experiences with resilience building to their own contexts. The program's target groups include employees in museums, monument preservation, and archives, as well as in related projects, but also students and academics from various disciplines. The goal is to build a strong Ukrainian-Polish-German alumni network to strengthen cooperation and competence transfer in the fields of museums, monument preservation, archives, and related institutions.
