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Hollókő is the first World Heritage village in Europe. The preservation of this village is exemplary not only because its long history ranges over different cultural heritage regimes and integrates various levels of heritage protection, but also because it is a village which incorporates intangible heritage elements from the very beginning of its conservation in spite of the fact that first it is only protected as an ensemble of vernacular buildings. Thus, this heritage village is not a mere protected unit of its built and natural environment, but the result of the long cooperation between the inhabitants and the heritage protection professionals, which will be examined in the context of heritage agency in this article.

The case of the Old Village of Hollókő demonstrates the workings of three concepts, which are related to current cultural heritage studies. Its sixty plus years of documented heritage protection can show:

how the layers of cultural heritage protection completed each other under the labels of tangible (built cultural and natural) and intangible heritage, that is how the regimes of cultural heritage (Sonkoly 2017: 153) unfold;

how the evolution of this heritage site resulted in the interaction between professionals and locals, who themselves respectively were influenced by the changing cultural heritage discourse and by the renewing social and cultural realities of the village constantly exposed to the increasing number and variety of visitors, that is how cultural heritage agency functions;

how this heritage village – typical to Central Europe – embodies current patterns of nation-building or those of other forms of identity building, that is the interrelatedness of the levels of cultural heritage.

The notion of ‘regime of cultural heritage’ is applied to conceptualise the expansion of cultural heritage in the last few decades. This process is part of a longer development, through which cultural heritage became an essential notion and reference for contemporary identity constructions. I propose the periodisation of this development in order to understand how the current concept of cultural heritage reached its complexity. From the perspective of this periodisation, the expression ‘regime’ is particularly useful, since it frames the history of cultural and social changes in relationship to the levels of the political establishment from universal to local. Due to the recent expansion of the notion of cultural heritage, its current regime can be characterised by means of intersections between heritage-making and “culture’s resource potential and the ensuing questions of ownership rights and responsibilities” (Bendix, Eggert and Peselmann 2012: 13). The use of regime instead of other temporal categories such as period, era, phase, etc. is also justified by the nature of the development of cultural heritage, which does not replace, but integrates the previous developments, which are the following: (1) Though there is an important “heritage transnationalism” during this period, the first regime is determined by national and local heritage conservation regulations and it lasts until the codification of international cultural heritage protection. In this regime, the term ‘heritage’ is significant in English and in French, but it is rarely used to describe cultural property claimed by a nation or a community in other languages. Primarily, ‘heritage’ means monuments (archaeological, architectural, historical, etc.) and natural settings endowed with cultural significance (c. 1800s-). (2) The second regime corresponds to the first institutionalisation of cultural heritage as an international norm. In this regime, the chief standard setting actors are UNESCO and its related institutions, which establish the categories of cultural heritage as ‘tangible’, ‘natural’ and ‘mixed’ in the principle standard setting instrument of the Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage (1960s-). (3) The third regime corresponds to the renewed institutionalisation of cultural heritage characterised by its expansion in terms of concepts, significance and number of heritage sites and elements. Due to the extended criticism of second regime categorisation, new heritage categorises and notions are established (community heritage, cultural landscape, cultural rights, historical urban landscape, intangible heritage, etc.), which re-interpret the principles of the second regime (Authenticity and Integrity) too. From the point of view of international standardisation, the fundamental instrument of this regime is the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (1990s-).

The regime-based interpretation of a heritage site or element allows a historical analysis in which the internal events and changes are more dominant than an external periodisation established by national and/or global events and processes. From this perspective, the political changes (communist dictatorship, ‘goulash communism’, transition to democracy, etc.) in Hungary of the studied period (1960s-2010s) are less significant than the local development. In the history of the heritagisation of Hollókő, the effects of communism merge into the all-embracing process of 20th century modernisation. However, there are two important impacts of communism, which must be considered: (1) the relatively early survey of vernacular architecture from the 1950s onwards, which originated from communist ideology with the purpose of the emancipation of working classes in the field of monument conservation; (2) the obligatory agricultural cooperatives destabilised further the traditional way of living in Hungarian villages already threatened by modernisation.

In my analysis, cultural heritage agency and the levels of heritage are interrelated concepts. The former refers to the collectiveness of heritage construction, which includes not only a great variety of social actors, such as local stakeholders, NGOs, researchers, experts and a hierarchy of administrators ranging from local to global, but also “non-human actors” (Harrison 2015: 306). Thus, the heritage site is regarded not as a mere composite of tangible, natural and eventual intangible elements, but as an evolving construction of these elements in line with the actor-network theory (Latour 2005). The levels of cultural heritage – such as local, regional, national, continental and universal – are advantageous to show how actors on these levels of interpretation interact during the construction of cultural heritage and how a certain authorised heritage discourse can be exploited and re-interpreted by actors representing different levels.

From the methodological point of view, Hollókő, assembling at least four levels of heritage building and recognition, is an exemplary case, since it is a locality with determined village stakeholders, representing regional (“Palóc”) importance as well as Hungarian national Folk Art and tradition on a universal level as a World Heritage Site. My analysis is primarily based on the written sources from different participants of the heritagisation of the village (official nomination and evaluation documents of the World Heritage Site, Management Plans, tourist guides, scholarly accounts of heritage preservation, public opinions expressed in the local journal) in order to understand the process and significance of heritagisation of the village and the role of the involved social actors. The current analysis will be used to prepare a team field work project with the objective of verifying the relevance of the analytical matrix determined by our three concepts.

Hollókő as a World Heritage Site

The number of World Heritage villages is very limited in comparison to other categories. In Europe, for example, there are only five villages out of the 457 sites. Among these villages three –“Old Village of Hollókő and its Surroundings” in Hungary (since 1987), Vlkolínec in Slovakia (since 1993) and “Holašovice Historic Village” in Czechia (since 1998) – are situated in Central Europe and the other two – New Lanark and Saltaire (both since 2001) – in the United Kingdom. The former three villages are characteristically different to the latter two according to the definition of their Outstanding Universal Value. While the Central European villages are listed as “living examples of rural life before the agricultural revolution” (UNESCO 1987) and the “well-preserved examples of traditional Central European villages,” (UNESCO 1998) the two British villages are recognised as World Heritage, because they represent philanthropic and Utopian ideals related to the industrial revolution. While the Central European villages are considered to manifest traditionally rural and agricultural lifestyles, the two philanthropic settlements are the examples of the heritagisation of 19th-century industrialisation and modernisation. Consequently, the traditional village seems to be a Central European speciality within Europe. Its earliest example – Hollókő – is nominated as the first Hungarian World Heritage site along with the national capital of Budapest in 1987.

Hollókő is a small village of some 300 inhabitants in Nógrád County, which is the poorest county of the country with a GDP per capita of 43% of the national average (2017). The village is situated in hilly Northern Hungary, some 100 km to the northeast of Budapest. From the point of view of heritage protection, it is composed of three parts: the ruins of a fortress (dating from the 14th century, legal recognition in 1972), the Old Village of 63 listed buildings (dating from the early 20th century, legal recognition in 1964) and the – smallest Hungarian – Natural Protection Zone of some 151 hectares (legal recognition in 1977). In addition to the historical settlement, a new village was constructed in the 1960s and 1970s as a response to the monumental conservation of the Old Village. Nowadays, the majority of the inhabitants reside here. Its population is Hungarian with an apparent dialect belonging to the “Palóc” subgroup living in the northern part of Hungary and the southern part of Slovakia. Though the village dates back the 13th century, it was almost totally repopulated in the early 18th century, after the end of the Ottoman wars. The Old Village gained its current architectural form after the devastating fire of 1909. By 1911, the traditional house structures were rebuilt, but their foundation was made of stone and their originally thatched roofs were replaced by less flammable shingle roofs.

The inscription of the Old Village of Hollókő on the World Heritage List is justified by Criterion (v), for the reason that “it is an outstanding example of a deliberately preserved traditional settlement, representative of a culture that has become vulnerable under the impact of irreversible change” (UNESCO 1987). The village appears as the living witness of “the traditional forms of rural life which were generally abolished by the agricultural revolution in the 20th century” (UNESCO 1987).

The current village and the economic activities of its inhabitants are the obvious refutation of World Heritage justifications: even in the 1980s, that is, in the decade of the UNESCO protection, the villagers were not exercising this traditional lifestyle and the World Heritage title brought about such an increase in tourism that the village was set apart even more from its traditional conditions. Nowadays, the village sticks out from its surroundings not by its preserved archaism, but, rather, by the fact that it is a well-visited living museum. Thus, we could finish this research with the conclusion that Hollókő meets the habitual fate of touristic heritage sites. Its protection not only fails to conserve the traditional living conditions, but also attracts mass tourism to invade the village, which accelerates the extinction of those conditions.

From the 1970s onwards, tourism has gradually become the main financial resource for the villagers. The depopulation of the village started in the same decade. Though the forced agricultural cooperative introduced by the communist regime was against the traditional organisational structure of agricultural production of the local society, which was based on households, the overall demographic and economic decline of the village could be explained by the general pull factors of modernisation such as emigration to cities, attraction to industrial and commercial activities as well as predilection for a lifestyle of a consumer society. After the fall of the communist regime at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, the village did not return to the traditional agricultural activities. Rather, it was exposed to tourism even more in a country with open borders. In addition to local entrepreneurs, the growing number of tourists attracted external investors – restaurant and souvenir shop owners – to the village, which was harshly criticised by experts of monument conservation in the 2000s (Limbacher 2005). The current commercial infrastructure serving tourism with some four restaurants, eight traditional workshops, seven tiny museums and eight souvenir shops seems to respect local ownership and crafts more than a decade ago. On the level of their representation, the exhibited and commercialised objects and products are connected tightly to the heritage of Hollókő; their actual provenance, however, requires further study.

All in all, the village is more than a living museum, since its inhabitants represent a continuity. This village is deliberately determined by the changing principles of monument and heritage preservation from the 1960s onwards. Preservation principles penetrate and affect the usual social practices and they develop continuously renewing forms which follow the new heritage patterns. As a folk heritage village, Hollókő embodies a certain unity of the tangible and intangible heritages even before this latter is conceptualised. Heritage protection itself becomes an essential part of the village’s heritage; therefore, it is justified to examine what exactly the object of protection is there since the beginning of its conservation as well as to specify the community which constructs and maintains that object.

First, Hollókő’s vernacular architecture – that is, its tangible heritage – was protected in the early 1960s. At the same time, the Master of Folk Art Award was established in Hungary in the same period (more exactly in 1953) as a recognition of the fact that the accelerating disappearance of traditional craftsmanship, arts and folklore could not be restrained without a national inventory of knowledge-bearers (Gombos 2019). This safeguarding inventory of folk tradition – a sort of predecessor of intangible heritage – shows that monument conservation was not the only norm in the domain of rural heritage in Central Europe in the mid-20th century. Half a century later, this Folk Art inventory along with its practice (including selection, evaluation, preservation, recognition, etc.) was not only put on the national intangible list in 2008, but it was also proposed to the UNESCO list as a good safeguarding practice in 2010 (Csonka-Takács 2010). Though the Master of Folk Art Award is not yet on the UNESCO list, its inclusion in the national heritage inventory indicates that not only heritage communities, but even heritage protection itself and its professional agents can be safeguarded at the beginning of the 21st century.

Cultural heritage agency

The inclusion of the history of the protection itself in the study of cultural heritage sites/elements has a double advantage. On the one hand, it can integrate the recent evolution of Social Sciences and Humanities into the analysis of cultural heritage, because the evaluation and the assessment of cultural heritage sites/elements are often prepared by the representatives of these sciences and the epistemological debates expressed as turns can often be considered as reflections of new identity buildings, which frequently manifest themselves under the label of cultural heritage. On the other hand, it puts social and cultural practices of heritagisation in a historical perspective that allows the establishment of the regimes of cultural heritage (Bendix, Eggert and Peselmann 2012: 11-20). These regimes are comparable to each other through the three groups of agents of heritagisation, that is, the heritage professional (‘heritage conservator’), the local community (the bearer of the protected cultural heritage) and the public. Pragmatically, it means that while cultural heritage preservation attempts to safeguard a cultural entity – considered as a traditional one – in its putative or real immobility among continuous social and cultural changes, this entity is also continuously reconstructed through the interaction of the heritage conservator, the heritage bearer (inhabitant) and the observer (visitor). In this context, the critical analysis of the interaction of these three groups of heritage agents is required in order to fully understand the contested values characteristic of different heritage regimes and heritage levels.

The UNESCO decision of 1987 lists those social and cultural conditions of Hollókő, which are usually classified as traditional peasant practices and described by Ethnography – more precisely by Folkore, its subdiscipline still used in Central Europe –, while their current modifications (Bíró 1987) are designated as folklorism (Kósa 2001: 236). As traditional cultural practices alter with social changes, this evaluation can reach eventually a threshold where professionals lose their interest in its preservation and they judge that the preserved cultural practice is extinct and the tradition is broken. Though the Old Village of Hollókő is never classified as an intangible heritage element on the national or UNESCO inventory, several local women mastering embroidery have been awarded with the title of Master of Folk Art. In this case, the continuity, originality and the authenticity of local folk traditions is questioned because of their performative representation. From the point of view of the ethnographers, the main challenge is to decide whether these performative practices are still legitimate objects of their discipline and research and, if it is so, how their interpretation influences the original paradigm of Ethnography.

As the village is adapting to the changing principles of heritage preservation and to the increasing presence of visitors, the number of ruptures is also growing. Its putatively archaic society is being modernised along with its practices. Academics and heritage professionals, who were originally in charge of the definition of the village as a scientific or safeguarded unit, reconsider their paradigms and norms. The supposedly stronger link between the visitors and the locals is becoming less significant, since more and more tourists arrive in the village, who do not see it as the cradle of national and traditional values. Amongst these dynamics and challenges, the ‘Old Village’, determined by heritage protection as a locality, represents continuity. Its analysis could arrange those processes together which do not necessarily belong to the same academic registers.

In order to comprehend the evolution of the locality of Hollókő, we can take the examples of the description of two weddings, which represent this village before and after its heritagisation. The first description dates back to 1935 and it was written by Viola Tomori (1992). The second was observed by a Hungarian ethnographer, Zoltán Fejős, in 1983 (Fejős 1992). Tomori quotes an inhabitant of a neighbouring village, when she refers to Hollókő “as a cursed place ... abandoned by God and deserted by man” (Tomori 1992: 3). On the contrary, Fejős came here to study the exemplary village of Hungarian vernacular architecture protection during his ethnographic field work. Tomori’s main objective was to understand the spirit of the Hungarian people in this village, which preserved its archaic character even in its relative proximity to Budapest, while Fejős raised epistemological questions about the object of Ethnography and ethnographic research, as he was inspired by the popular practices essentially modified in comparison with the conditions described a few decades before. For Tomori, the local peasant lived in his or her isolated world, he or she was incapable of abstraction, exhibited openly his or her love and manifested ahistorical characteristics. For Fejős, the inhabitants of Hollókő were staged actors, who performed their own wedding in a stylised traditional manner to the demand of foreign tourist groups; then, they repeated it in a modernised setting among their fellow villagers. Tomori observed a symbiosis between the social and the natural environment as well as an organic evolution, which designated the local inhabitants as the carriers of national attributes. Fejős recounted the interaction between German and even African – a real rarity in communist Hungary – tourists during the performance of the wedding. Less than fifty years passed between the two descriptions, during which both the local practices and the methodology and the objectives of the analysts changed considerably. By the early 1980s, the folklorism of the local cultural and social practices did not qualify for the criteria of Authenticity and Originality. However, they triggered the researcher to categorise these practices and to question the relevance of the original academic principles.

Construction of local identity

The description of the two weddings may raise two questions: how the archaic peasant becomes a folklorising performer in a few decades and how the conditions of modernisation integrate the heritagisation of the locality. From the perspective of the identity, the national scope lessens in comparison to the regional and local ones. The “Palóc” identity, which was previously taken to represent the totality of the Magyars in national Humanities, appears in the heritage documents to emphasise the peculiarities of the village. The English text of the UNESCO decision not only mentions seven times its “Palóc” characteristics, but it even makes reference to the role of the medieval castle in the “feudal wars of the Palóc,” which are otherwise unknown to the Hungarian historiography as a concept (UNESCO 1987).

The heritage documents refer to Hollókő as a settlement, a factor which is particularly important to maintain traditional social and cultural practices. The Hungarian ethnographic literature, however, does not seem to prove this significance. There is no ethnographic monography about this village, it has no entry in the Hungarian Ethnographic Lexicon and it is represented only by three photos in the entry for “Palóc” country (Ortutay 1981). Although it is mentioned a dozen times in the eight volumes of Hungarian Ethnography, it is always used as an example of heritage protection or as a World Heritage Site and not as a significant village from the ethnographic perspective (Paládi-Kovács 1988-2002: IV.323). Consequently, it did not become an internationally renowned heritage village due to its ethnographic excellence. The heritage locality of Hollókő originates from the cooperation of heritage professionals – predominantly architects – and local decision makers. András Román (1929-2005), the eminent Hungarian heritage architect who was in charge of the village’s conservation and UNESCO nomination, describes this process like this: “Hollókő was born to be inherited by Nature and Folk Art, but it is to the merit of an academic and professional team that this heritage belongs to us and to the world,” since “the correct and continuous cooperation between heritage conservation and the local council could be ensured only here and nowhere else in Hungary since 1961” (Román 1990: 4-5). Thus, successful heritage conservation counts on the local institutions and invites them for the establishment of the heritage inventory, which can guarantee a dynamic management of change and the preservation of vernacular architecture in situ.

The first Hungarian register of vernacular monuments was created in 1960 and it led to the first list of protected ensembles of vernacular architecture in six settlements including the Old Village of Hollókő in the 1960s. In the first ICOMOS conference on vernacular architecture in Bratislava in 1971, Ferenc Mendele (1934-1994) and András Román, the two protagonists of the local heritage preservation, reported proudly about Hollókő as the most successful Hungarian example. Román delivered a general lecture about the protection of vernacular architecture in Hungary (Román 1976), while Mendele talked exclusively about Hollókő in his paper entitled The reconstruction of a historical Palóc settlement (Mendele 1976). It was not only the title but the whole paper which described repeatedly this preservation as a reconstruction in the case of the pavements, the meadows and even the totality of the Old Village. Thus, the tangible cultural heritage of Hollókő is a result of the achievements of heritage architects with the participation of the local municipality. This construction of tangible heritage leads to cultural practices, which are referred to as intangible cultural heritage successively. Obviously, these practices are stemming from former practices, which are threatened or even suppressed by modernisation, and, consequently, their revival is not framed by traditional social conditions, but by the guidelines of heritage preservation, which are also appropriate to reconstruct local and regional identities.

From tangible to intangible heritage

The definition of Hollókő as a heritage locality concentrates on its territory, on the built environment and on the surrounding landscape in order to construct a harmonious and archaic unit, which can become a model for decision makers and an attractive destination for tourists. Apparently, this reconstruction is not accompanied by any scholarly demand to maintain traditional social and cultural practices. In 1972, the first touristic guide edited by Mendele described the situation of the traditional folk costumes quite indifferently: “female folk costume in Hollókő dwindles. Nobody dresses her children in traditional clothing… Because of higher schooling, more frequent visits to cities and medical guidance, the new generation replaces their former attire by more comfortable, easily and cheaply accessible, not distinguishable urban garments almost unnoticeably” (Mendele 1972: 17). There is no allusion in the entire guidebook, which would encourage the safeguarding of this traditional attire. Moreover, its vanishing seems to be unavoidable.

By the time of the UNESCO denomination, however, traditional local knowledge was expected to be resuscitated. A guidebook in 1989 expressed a wish that “dying craftsmanship, artisanship and folk arts will hopefully revive in this protected area” (Kovács 1989: 8.) One year later, András Román not only asserted the resurrection of folk activities in connection with the preparation of traditional costumes, but also justified it by successful tangible heritage conservation (Román 1990: 6). The local attire, which seemed to disappear in the 1970s, came into vogue in the 1990s. Since the heritage village was exposed to an increasing number of tourists, the entertainment of these tourists had to be facilitated within the frameworks of the unalterable built heritage. Consequently, the evident rupture in the traditional social conditions was soothed by the continuity of the traditional attire and by the related crafts (dress-making, embroidery, etc.). While the heritage locality became a stage for tourists, the folk costumes became performative costumes and the traditional economic and cultural practices became performative actions. In 2006, this transformation was officially recognised, when the Palóc Museum of the district town, Balassagyarmat, acquired four Hollókő costumes as stage costumes (Lengyel 2006). Obviously, these garments are not the products of a traditional lifestyle and they are not purchased for the museum collection to follow the tradition acquisition policy of an ethnographic museum. These stage costumes are composed on the basis of the traditional garments from the point of view of their materials and their preparation, but they do not refer to the conditions of their owner (marital status, age, social position) as opposed to the traditional ones. Moreover, these stage costumes are easier to put on, they are more colourful – which was more typical of holiday costumes formerly – and they can be worn with modern accessories (dyed hair, wristwatch, makeup, etc.). Their imitative function could safeguard certain traditional crafts and it could even assist their renewed institutionalisation under the auspices of the Master of Folk Art Award. The dress-maker of the four acquired costumes was awarded with this title and she ran an extended network of attire-makers in Hollókő and in its vicinity to fulfil the growing demand for these colourful costumes. Thus, it is the tangible heritage which provides the necessary protection and attraction for the survival, redefinition and modes of adjustment of the intangible heritage. The local recognition of cultural heritage protection is well reflected in the calendar of the heritage locality. Among the religious and social holidays of the village, the day of the UNESCO decision – 11 December – is listed as a day of public celebrations. The guest house of the Old Village is named after Dr. (sic) András Román, whose achievements were crucial to attaining that decision. The local decision makers are ready to recognise the accomplishment of heritage professionals in the construction of their cultural heritage and to attune their practices to the standards of heritage safeguard.

Conclusion

The three initial concepts – regimes, agency and levels of cultural heritage – emerged in their complexities though the analysis of the World Heritage Village of Hollókő. The three regimes of cultural heritage can be traced back in the case of the village’s heritagisation. The first regime of national heritage conservation starts in the 1960s, when its vernacular architecture becomes part of the national inventory. The second regime starts in the 1980s, when it is nominated and recognised among the very first Hungarian World Heritage Sites. The third regime might be counted from 2006, when the first stage costumes are acquired by the regional museum. From the perspective of heritagisation, the first regime is preceded by the scientific prehistory of this locality, in which the place is assessed by the ethnographer, who searches for local carriers of the popular culture of the nation. His or her results are published for a scholarly public and converted into a format, which can be generalised in an overall national classification. In the first regime, it is still an academic, but not an ethnographer, rather, a heritage architect, who initiates the representation of the village in collaboration with the locals as a heritage site of the built and the natural environment. This successful achievement attracts tourists and international recognition. During the second regime, the heritage locality is exposed not only to a growing number of tourists, but also to a regular evaluation of its tangible heritage and to an increasing demand for its folk products, which are redefined as intangible heritage. This periodisation matches quite well Daniel Fabre’s model that he established to describe the last century of the Parisian quarter of Marais (Fabre 2009: 34-49). Similarly to Hollókő, the Marais appears to have been the victim of modernisation until the mid-20th century, since it was characterised by mass emigration and impoverishment. It was even classified as an unhealthy neighbourhood doomed to be demolished. According to Fabre, this is the period of déclassement, which is important for heritagisation, because it empties the original functions of the locality and makes it desperate. It is followed by the second phase, classement, during which the locality is discovered by heritage professionals and the remaining population can survive among new conditions. Nevertheless, successful heritagisation can result in a surclassement in the form of a World Heritage Site according to Fabre. In this process, heritage becomes such a locality, whose inhabitants are interested in a more efficient heritagisation and in its consequent increasing profit. In this context, local decision makers can be misguided by the UNESCO recognition and they can think that they have entered the otherwise unattainable world economy. To repay this illusion, the narrative linked to the heritage locality is expected to be replaced from national references to universal ones. In the case of Central European sites, however, this replacement does not necessarily manifest itself on all the levels of heritagisation.

As we could see, there are only three Central European heritage villages among the European World Heritage sites, which are recognised due to their outstanding universal value in folk art and vernacular architecture. Though these three villages are significantly different from the point of view of their social and cultural traditions as well as from their architecture, they are interpreted as typical Central European villages in the UNESCO documentation. It is not only this regional belonging, which is emphasised, but also other ethnical – and non-national – identities. In the case of Hollókő, its Palóc origin is stressed. In the case of Holašovice, its “South Bohemian” (regional and multi-ethnic) and not “Czech” (national) character is mentioned (UNESCO 1998). In the universal discourse of cultural heritage, it is a norm to refer to regional – as Central Europe, Northern Hungary, Southern Bohemia, etc. –, multi-ethnic and supra- or infra-national belongings to encourage the safeguard of cultural diversity. Consequently, the universal and regional levels of cultural heritage discourse usually strengthen each other mutually. The position and the influence of the national level, however, is more contradictory. In the case of UNESCO sites, the nation-states are in charge of the nominations – both for tangible and intangible heritage – that is, they have to be in tune with the universal discourse, if they strive for new sites/elements. Nevertheless, it is quite revealing that both Hungary and Slovakia put their respective villages among their very first World Heritage nominations. Even in the case of Czechia, where small town heritage is more significant for nation-building than any other Central European country (Sonkoly 2011), the nomination of Holašovice takes place only four years after the country’s ratification of the World Heritage Convention. For these Central European countries, folk tradition and vernacular architecture are significant for nation building, and the redefinition of their original pattern of national identity constructions should also be taken into consideration in the analysis of their recognised and tentative World Heritage lists. The national level of the cultural heritage discourse is particularly intricate, since it can integrate such contradictory discourses as the inclusive cultural diversity one and the exclusive traditional national one. The role of the national institutions in the construction of the current heritage discourse and the selection and interpretation of its sites/elements are affected to a great extent by the current political discourses in the respective countries. The inclusive character of cultural heritage can bring the recognised values of cultural diversity and cultural rights to the national level, while the redefinition of exclusive nationalist identities can lead to the exploitation of the same cultural heritage discourse for a populist agenda by using its misinterpreted participatory and non-critical properties.

The interaction between the levels of cultural heritage building shows that the agency of heritage institutions and groups is essential in the realisation of heritage values and norms. The cultural heritage agency can be examined in a matrix, which is determined by the three regimes of cultural heritage and by the multiple levels of heritage interpretations ranging from universal to local. From the perspective of the heritage conservator, the prehistory and the three regimes represent different challenges. First, the ethnographer describes local folklore as an integral part of the national register. This interpretation is gradually defied by the heritagisation of the locality in the first and the second regimes during which the newly shaping folklorism shatters its putative authenticity. In the third regime, the new practices can be institutionalised under the label of intangible heritage, since they are the expressions of a living community previously determined by tangible heritage conservation. Heritage professionals and academics face different challenges in this heritage locality. Heritage conservators duly and officially document and evaluate the built cultural and the natural environment. Museologists acquire folk products, which do not satisfy the traditional principles of Authenticity and Originality, but properly represent current social practices. In the new regime of cultural heritage, heritage professionals and local decision makers are expected to decide how they wish to integrate the practice of heritage preservation in the definition of intangible heritage. Central European ethnographers, who seem to be the most perplexed in front of the third regime of cultural heritage, need to reconsider the effects of intangible heritage on their objects of study and on their discipline in general. As the introduction of the concept of places of memory by Pierre Nora triggers French historians to redefine their discipline in relationship to this “project programme” in the 1990s (Hottin 2009: 10-11), the third heritage regime concept of intangible heritage brings similar unavoidable dynamics for ethnographers in the 2000s. Since the concept of intangible heritage can include practically every social and cultural practice, it does not exclusively affect Ethnography, but a much wider range of Humanities and Social Sciences. Although monuments are not necessarily the object of these sciences, the utilisation of tangible heritage in intangible canons – as in the case of the Old Village of Hollókő – produces changes during which “une mise en récit héroïque dans laquelle l’Histoire dont le monument est le témoin est remplacée par l’histoire de sa monumentalisation” (Fabre 2009: 25).

Juxtaposing heritage and political regimes could open a new interdisciplinary field of study, in which different levels of political history/periodisation are confronted with the levels and processes of heritagisation. The case of Hollókő showed that communism did not enhance considerably the prevailing effects of modernisation and its ideological emancipatory conservation of peasant architecture could counterbalance the deteriorating social impact of the forced agricultural cooperatives from the point of view of the strategies of the local community, which was quite efficient in controlling its own destiny due to its alliance with heritage experts. The monument conservation and the rising tourism lead to the development of the new village, in which the inhabitants could keep their privacy and cultivate their social and cultural practices, which are not exposed to the visiting public.

Even if the heritage community is recognised to safeguard its traditional lifestyle, it is exposed to notable transformations. The two weddings – described respectively in 1935 and in 1983 – draw our attention to one of the most important characteristics, to a certain extent, of every heritage community, that is, the abandon of its intimacy (Grenet 2011: 16-17). Intimacy is sacrificed to fulfil the standards of a new heritage representation, which would guarantee the community’s survival. Thus, this sacrifice happens with the consent of the community members or even by their initiative. The willingness of the inhabitants of Hollókő to redefine themselves as a heritage community proves to be similar to other heritage communities, which are the bearers of UNESCO intangible heritage elements. In this respect, an ideal candidate for heritage recognition is a threatened community, which is still in the possession of particular living social and cultural practices, and these practices can be interpreted as unique and representative (Fournier 2011: 164). It becomes possible as soon as the community ceases to perceive these practices as rituals and it detaches itself from its own traditions enough in order to start managing them (Noyes 2011: 144). Consequently, heritagisation does not wipe out, but reuses these broken social practices. The price for this transformation is that the community should become a “public community” (Grenet 2011: 16), which means that the rather sharp line separating public and private spheres – drawn in the first centuries of the modern era – is blurred. Obviously, the third agent, the visitor is also influenced by the transformations of conditions of the heritage conservator and the heritage bearer. Visitors move in a new space of references, which are restructured by heritage localities. In the case of Nógrád County, tiny Hollókő appears customarily as its cultural centre due to its UNESCO recognition (Méhes 2009). Thriving heritagisation attracts a motley crowd that may be interested in various levels of heritage interpretation, which can be contradictory to each other, but usually is represented in peaceful unity under the auspices of the acknowledged heritage locality.

A rare rupture of this peaceful unity was signalled by a disapprobative decision of the Equal Treatment Authority of Hungary against the Hollókő World Heritage Management Non-profit Ltd, which refused to rent a local folk costume for a transgender person for a photo shoot by declaring that Hollókő is “a closed Christian community”.[2] This incident not only shows the eventual limits of the consensual opening of any heritage community, but also refers to the fact that while the rise of Cultural Heritage in its second regime was partially due to the democratisation of Western societies with several minorities searching for the means of their cultural self-expression, former Eastern Block countries could experience the same social and cultural movements and freedom on a very limited level (CHCF 2015: 112-115). Here, the adaptation of the concept of Cultural Heritage in the 1990s does not necessarily reflect the same realities or evolution in these societies. It could serve the adaptability of local communities to the challenges of modernisation, but it did not automatically confer the possibility of emancipation on every threatened or minority community.