EELISA Heritage Week: Ten Ways of Protecting the Past

Scuola Normale in Pisa took a different route into the same week, framing heritage as something that has to stay in conversation with the present. Since 2012, the university’s Palazzo della Carovana has hosted a rotating exhibition of contemporary art from the Centro Pecci di Prato, hung beneath the coats of arms of the Knights of Saint Stephen. Vasari’s architecture and today’s art, in the same rooms. SNS tied that back to its own work inside EELISA: a Summer School on archaeological conservation at the Valle dei Templi, and a Digital Philology community using new tools to keep old texts legible.

PSL, in Paris, simply opened its own campuses for the weekend: the Hôtel de Vendôme at Mines Paris, the domes of the Paris Observatory, Marie Curie’s former office at the Institut Curie, the historic reading rooms of the École nationale des chartes. Places where people still teach and research daily.

On 22 October 1956, students at what was then the Technical University gathered in their own auditorium to draft the demands that, within a day, set off the Hungarian Revolution. What began as a student assembly grew into a nationwide uprising against Soviet rule — one that shook the credibility of the Soviet system worldwide and, decades later, is remembered as an early sign of what would become 1989. Several BME students and faculty died in the uprising.

Drawings made by children at the Volksschule Stein elementary school between 1924 and 1929, under a teacher who broke from convention and let his pupils think and create for themselves. The drawings survived nearly a century and now sit in the History of School Education Collection, run jointly by FAU and the city of Nuremberg, added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register last year. A record of what children saw and felt after the First World War, and a reminder that classrooms have always had room for creative approaches.

ITU went back furthest of all. Its museum holds an astrolabe made in Al-Andalus in 1216, later gifted by Sultan Selim III to the military engineering school regarded as ITU’s own institutional ancestor. The astrolabe, which uses positional data from celestial bodies to calculate time, direction, and geographical routes, is one of the earliest technical instruments in history. Used for centuries in astronomy, geography, and navigation, it transferred complex calculations concerning the sky onto a portable plane.
Based on the principle of solving complex problems through measurable systems, its design embodies the scientific method and engineering approach that ITU has upheld since its foundation.

Hidden within the historic Polizu campus of the University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest lies a gem of European scientific heritage: the Polizu Subsonic Wind Tunnel. Built in 1931 and, at the time, one of the most advanced aerodynamic testing facilities anywhere, the tunnel was designed under aviation pioneer Elie Carafoli and drew visits from figures like Ludwig Prandtl; the Sorbonne later asked to copy its design.

The Fradet Archive is a collection of maps, technical drawings and correspondence documenting how railways spread across 19th-century Ottoman Europe. Infrastructure, in this telling, is also identity: a record of how Europe first started connecting itself.

Sonja Koch, a scenographer redesigning the exhibition inside the Technikum building, keeping ZHAW’s institutional memory legible to people who weren’t there for the history the building already holds.

SSSA in Pisa reached for words carved into its own entrance: “Pur bella la vita, merita di rischiare” (“However beautiful life may be, it’s worth the risk”), and connected them to the Cloister of San Girolamo. Restored in the 16th century by Girolamo Ammannati and adorned with 17th-century frescoes attributed to Rutilio Manetti, its frescoes still stand over generations of students who’ve taken that inscription’s advice.