Péter Szabó
1447-CUL-SZA-HU
Management of Mixed Cultural and Natural World Heritage Sites in
East-Central Europe: A Case Study of Visegrád
Interim Activity Report
In the first two months I was carrying out the necessary background
research to the project. I studied
- the structure and working of UNESCO World Heritage, with special
attention to the Periodic Reporting and, in connection with this, the
recent policies concerning Management Plans of the (proposed or listed)
sites
- the Hungarian legal background of Monument Protection, Nature
Protection, and UNESCO World Heritage
- the Hungarian organisational structure of World Heritage
- large numbers of Management Plans of sites already on the World
Heritage List, as available on the internet
All through the first five months, I was building contacts with
- the relevant agencies in the Czech Republic, through the person
of Jan Dolák, chairholder of the UNESCO Chair of Museology
and World Heritage at the Masaryk Univeristy in Brno, and Libor
Kabát and Jiri Petru, Mayors of Lednice and Valtice towns, my
target World Heritage site in the Czech Republic
- Polish partners, namely Bogdan Jaroszewicz, Deputy Director of
Bialowieza National Park and World Heritage Site
- English partners: Helen Read, Conservation Officer at Burnham
Beeches, Corporation of London; Adrian Clark, Property Manager of
Hatfield Forest, National Trust; Oliver Rackham, Fellow of Corpus
Christi College, historical ecologist; Ted Green, consultant to Windsor
Great Park. All of these people I met during my visit to England
- people involved in the management of the tentative listed World
Heritage site of Visegrád, among others, Sándor
Hadházy, mayor; Péter Erdős, leader of the
Visegrád unit of Pilis Parkforestry Ltd; Miklós Papp,
leader of the Pilis unit of the Duna-Ipoly National Park;
Mátyás Szőke, director of King Matthias Museum in
Visegrád
To work towards the planned volume to enhance the acceptance of
Visegrád onto the World Heritage List, I have discussed the
structure of the book with my group mentor, and contacted and
provisionally agreed with the following authors
- Orsolya Mészáros, Gergely Buzás, Zoltán
Batizi, József Laszlovszky. An important meeting with
András Pálóczi Horváth about the second
half of contributors is to be held in the near future
10 – 19 July, I travelled to England, where I visited a number of
important sites that offer highly relevant analogies to the situation
that exists at Visegrád. These sites were
- Hatfield Forest, one of the closest parallels to Visegrád and
Pilis anywhere in the world. It is a Royal hunting Forest, which,
unlike Pilis, survived almost intact, thus the lessons its management
teaches us are directly relevant to issues at Visegrád
- Burnham Beeches and Windsor Forest, which, besides the historical
resemblances, helped me to form conclusions about Visegrád,
because they are also very close to a major city (Windsor, in fact, is
part of London), therefore one of the biggest policy issues of
Visegrád – what to do with the high number of visitors – can be
approached with the experiences gathered in England
26 July – 3 August, I will travel to Poland, to the World Heritage Site
of Bialowieza National Park. I have organised meetings with site
managers and local specialists. Later in August, I will travel to the
Czech Republic, to the World Heritage Site of Lednice-Valtice, the
organisational part of which I have already done.