OUR SPEAKERS: Hanna Havryliv: “Heritage in private hands is not a sentence, but an opportunity to preserve it”
There is an opinion that objects of historical and cultural heritage must necessarily be in state or municipal ownership. How it is taken care of is another matter. That’s why we have castles, manors and other historical buildings on the balance sheet of communities that are in a state of disrepair and may soon cease to exist.
According to Hanna Havryliv, founder of the Heritage.UA project, director of the Rozdil Palace LLC and speaker at the Art of Victory Forum, the solution is to transfer cultural heritage sites to private hands. In fact, this process has already begun: dozens of objects are being put up for privatization through the ProZorro system, because communities, especially small ones, are unable or unwilling to maintain them. This means that hundreds of thousands of historic buildings that will not be properly maintained risk disappearing forever.
“Whether we like it or not, cultural heritage sites are now falling into private hands. And this is not a sentence, but an opportunity to preserve it. Because it gives opportunities for a new resource, private funds. And this opens up new opportunities for the heritage sites themselves, for the owner, and for the community. Because if an object becomes privately owned, the new owner pays real estate tax to the local budget, pays for land lease, creates jobs, undertakes to maintain and preserve it, etc.”, says Ms. Havryliv.
There is already a successful example of such a partnership: the Ukrainian investment company EFI Group has become the new owner of the Lianskoronski-Zewuski Palace in Rozdol, Lviv Oblast, and plans to revive it. This partnership has every chance of becoming the first successful case study, a corporate social responsibility project that will inspire other business representatives and philanthropists to believe in Ukraine’s cultural heritage as a new area for investment.
“We stand at the origins of the Ukrainian cultural heritage market. And Heritage.UA is one of the first initiatives that believed in the format of investing in historical real estate and managing it on the basis of economic efficiency as perhaps the only way to save hundreds of thousands of cultural heritage sites that are now irrevocably dying in small communities in Ukraine,” says Ganna Havryliv.
By the way, EFI Group is a partner of the Art of Victory Forum, which will be held in Lviv on December 8-9. To register for the Forum, please follow the link: https://www.facebook.com/events/1672447053263491
Допис створений в рамках проекту за підтримки Відділу преси, освіти та культури Посольства США в Україні. Погляди авторів не обов’язково збігаються з офіційною позицією уряду США. / Supported by the Public Affairs Section of the U.S. Embassy to Ukraine. The views of the authors do not necessarily reflect the official position of the U.S. Government.
