About us

What is Heritas?

Heritas is a new look at cultural heritage. It is a platform that pools together everybody who is interested in cultural heritage, its conservation and knowledge, everybody who is willing to get a deeper understanding of what we have inherited, who dare to discuss and revive the old for a new life.

About the Festival

Heritas is a cultural heritage festival that takes place once a year and focuses on cultural heritage knowledge, conservation, and technologies. The festival aims at bringing together professionals, governmental and private organisations, public establishments and enterprises from the area of cultural heritage, representatives of the public who are interested in the preservation of cultural heritage, and encourages their cooperation and more effective mutual communication. The festival offers active alternative discussions, a space for diverse creative workshops, consultations with heritage professionals, presentations on diverse topics, a space for activities of children and youth, heritage walks to cultural heritage objects that have not been discovered or opened for the public yet, also presentations by festival participants. Heritas is also a place to form new contacts, to learn and try something new and to get answers to various questions of concern. That is the first event of such a format in the Baltic states. It is dedicated not only for a narrow range of cultural heritage specialists – most importantly, it is also open for the public and heritage enthusiasts.

Heritas Team

Heritas is a non-commercial citizen's initiative implemented by volunteers who care about cultural heritage. Public establishment (VšĮ) Heritas LT was founded on 27 January 2020. It has been incorporated by the team, which organised the festival Heritas in 2018 and consists of 7 volunteers who have worked with Heritas from the very birth of its idea to the implementation of the festivals. Each year, between 15 and 30 volunteers join Heritas and help implement the ideas of the cultural heritage festival Heritas, as well as contribute to other regular activities of Heritas.

2020 Heritas Team (photograph). From left on the second row: Agnė, Deimantė, Vilija, Milda, Lina, Greta, Miglė, first row: Milda, Ieva, Indrė, Inga, Erika, Juta.

2019 Heritas Team (photograph). From left on the second row: Mantas, Marius, Miglė, Romas, Donata, Milda, first row: Vilija, Indrė, Erika, Eglė, Ieva.

History of Heritas

Heritas was born in 2018 from the desire to promote positive developments in the long established system and present heritage and its topics through knowledge and live contact. The intention was to create a platform where everybody working in the area of heritage would cooperate and would be able to learn from each other, where managers of cultural heritage structures and historical buildings would be able to easily find simple and understandable information in a single place and get answers to their questions about the maintenance and conservation of cultural heritage objects, about their adaptive reuse.

The first Heritas festival took place at the Church of Blessed Virgin Mary Our Lady of Consolation on 18-19 May 2018. The second Heritas festival was held on 3–4 May 2019; it expanded to the nearby spaces of the European Humanities University and offered many more and more diverse activities for cultural heritage professionals, visitors, children and youth. Considering a large interest from the public and the need for continuity of this initiative, Heritas acquired an institutional status early in 2020 – public establishment Heritas LT.

2018 photo gallery

2019 photo gallery

On 2-4 October 2020, the third event was held. It has grown into the cultural heritage festival that offers diverse knowledge-building and educational activities for the public – Heritas’20: (Re)Charge the Heritage! The initiative Heritas is supported and partly funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and Vilnius City Municipality. The patron of the Festival – the Lithuanian National Commission for UNESCO. Organising partners – Faculty of History of Vilnius University, Cultural Heritage Centre, partners – National Commission for Cultural Heritage, Department of Cultural Heritage under the Ministry of Culture, Old Town Renewal Agency, Lithuanian Archaeology Society, and others.

The activities of VšĮ Heritas LT are not limited only to organising a cultural heritage festival. The establishment and its founders are also actively involved in other activities that promote better knowledge of cultural heritage in society – they have held “The Day with Heritas” at the summer camp organised by VšĮ Gatvės gyvos where its tours in the Old Town of Vilnius invited children to get to know the art of stained-glass better, and held a workshop. In addition, a two-day study programme was arranged in the project EUNIC Baltic Road Trip implemented by the Lithuanian Culture Institute and partners for the youth of 18 to 26 years of age on the topic “Impact of Cultural Heritage in Society Life and its Role in Constructing an Identity”.

In July 2020, the Lithuanian Council for Culture allocated financing for the project of VšĮ Heritas LT “Digitisation of the content of the international cultural heritage festival Heritas and creation of new digital products for better knowledge of cultural heritage”. The goal of the Project is to increase the dissemination of cultural-educational content related to the knowledge of cultural heritage making use of the digital space and involving different creators of cultural products and artists. The result – the digital space featuring the educational content and information on the knowledge of cultural heritage and its dissemination, created during the previous international shows on the knowledge, conservation and technologies of cultural heritage – Heritas.

VšĮ Heritas LT has been expanding the range and scope of its activities each year. It aims at promoting higher interest of the public in cultural heritage, its preservation, raising public awareness, encouraging discussions among professionals working in the area of heritage, as well as discussions with the public. Special attention is paid to the education of children and youth by encouraging children and schoolchildren to get to know cultural heritage better, understand and explore it.

2020 photo gallery