The Wooden Tserkvas of the Carpathian Region are 16 wooden churches in the border region of Poland and Ukraine. There are 8 inscribed churches in each country. During my long weekend in southeastern Poland I focused on the Polish ones. Beforehand I plotted them all on a map, and as you can see in the figure below it will take a long drive to cover them all. Two tserkvas straddle the Ukranian border below Zamosc , and I was tempted to drive even further north to include that WHS also. But it still is a 1.5 hour drive from Radruz. Daytrips to L’viv in Ukraine are also advertised from the larger cities in this region, so this is a true hotspot.

The 8 bigger white dots represent the Tserkvas in Poland

In the end I only had time for the 6 in southern Poland, those that lie near the border with Slovakia. Most of the previous reviewers seem to have visited the cluster of 4 below Gorlice, although John Booth of course made it even to the most remote ones by public transport! ‘Tserkva’ means ‘church’ in the Ukrainian …

Southeastern Poland holds two sets of WH-listed wooden churches, which lie in overlapping areas. It’s an important travel decision whether to mix them and take in as many as possible while driving the most efficient route, or to separate them which also means not being able to visit every single one. I opted for the latter, as I thought otherwise the two sets would blur into one in my memory. I had about 1.5 days to spare in the area, and devoted the first afternoon to two of The Wooden Churches of Southern Malopolska .

Church of St. Leonard (Lipnica Murowana)

The most difficult thing about visiting any of the wooden churches is just finding them. I immediately ran into trouble with the first one, the church in Lipnica Murowana. Lipnica is a pretty cute and sizeable town, where in the center I noticed a sign pointing to the "Church of St. Leonard” rightaway. However, when I entered the indicated street I ended up at a large modern church. I wondered how this could have the same name as the old wooden one! I checked my notes for more …

Hardly two weeks after the WHC meeting of 2015 that gave me no less than 9 'new' sites, I hit the road again for my 580th WHS. The start of daily KLM flights to Cracow drew me to a revisit of Southern Poland. I had been to Cracow in 2005, visiting the Old Town , the Wieliczka Salt Mine and Kalwaria Zebrzydowska . At that time I decided to skip Auschwitz, as I wasn’t really in the mood for what I knew would be a very moving visit. This time around I started with Auschwitz Birkenau , staying overnight in Oswiecim. I had reserved entry for 8 a.m. on Saturday morning. Visitor numbers are limited to 100-200 an hour depending on the hour, so it’s best to pre-book a spot. Later in the day places fill up quickly, as after 10 a.m. these include guided tours in German, English, Russian, Spanish or Polish.

Original wooden barracks in Birkenau

When I arrived at about 7.50, already some 100 people were queuing to get in. The doors do not open until 8 a.m., and then you have …

American Lee Abbamonte has a travel blog which I used to follow a few years ago, when he was still a young guy discovering the world. He came back on my radar recently when he teamed up with journalist Ryan Trapp to write ‘ Chasing 193: The Quest to Visit Every Country in the World ’. The book is not about him: it features circa 30 people from all walks of life and corners of the world who are trying to visit the current 193 UN countries.

Pros and cons of the book

Not all interviewees have visited 193 nations yet, or are close to that goal (for some it’s not even a goal). The 30 include mostly white North American/European males, people that are ranked high on the MTP list or active TCC members. The interviews are all done in the same Q&A format, which a more imaginative journalist could have done better as it gets tedious after a while. I also suspect that most of them were obtained via exchanging e-mails.

Despite these shortcomings, I finished the 434 pages quickly. Some of the included travel life …

Although I did not need the credits anymore towards my Bachelor Degree in Cultural Sciences, I was tempted by a new course from the Dutch Open University about ‘Cultural Heritage’. It comes with a book called The Heritage Universe : 11 chapters on topics such as canonization, conservation and 'tainted' heritage.'

The Scientific Approach

It would not be a proper scientific book without a theoretic model of course. In this case that of Austrian art historian Alois Riegl , who publicized his ideas around 1903-1905. He focussed on the experience of the individual, on the relationship we have with monuments and objects from the past. This in contrast to those scientists aiming for an ideal, universal standard. He distinguished 6 values that are attributed to objects/sites, such as age value, historical value, esthetic value and utility. So when we value ruins from Antiquity for example, we value them in a state that we can notice they are truly old (incomplete, overgrown, ruined). For him the 20th century was all about this 'age' criterion. The authors conclude that in the 21st century, conflict and nostalgia will be the …

In southern Denmark lies a small town where in 1773 the Protestant Herrnhutter started a new church community. Their town plan and characteristic light brick houses have been preserved until today. It is a quiet place where linden trees line the streets on both sides, and where the huge wooden Moravian Church is still the focal point. Christiansfeld a Moravian Settlement is one of no less than three Danish nominations for 2015.

The Moravian hotel

The Herrnhutter or Moravian Brethren are a Protestant denomination originating from Bohemia, whose members settled in Saxony (now Germany) after being persecuted in the Catholic Habsburg lands. There they established a new village called Herrnhut, and from that place they started the first large-scale Protestant missionary movement. They sent their missionaries to all parts of the world. Denmark (or more accurately: the Dano-Norwegian Empire of that period) was one of the first places they went to. Christiansfeld is an easy site to visit on the way between the Jelling WHS and the Hamburg Speicherstadt TWHS , and well worth a short stop. I was there in April 2013 and I walked Christianfeld’s picturesque main …

The Archaeo-astronomical Site Kokino is a Bronze age site in the north-east of the Republic of Macedonia, not far from the border with Serbia. It was rediscovered as recently as 2001 by local archeologist Jovica Stankovski. There’s a lot of overenthusiastic misinformation about the site on the web, consisting of often repeated statements such that it is already a WHS or that it gained a 4th place among astronomical sites by NASA research. For now it is on Macedonia’s Tentative List, being put forward as an ancient observatory and holy mountain. Though it may come across as an obscure site, it is fairly well-known within the country's tourist industry.

Arrival at Kokino

I visited Kokino on the penultimate day of my short Balkan Tour of 2015. There’s no public transport going to the site, so I hired a car with driver from travel-macedonia who did the 3 hour round-trip including an hour's wait for a reasonable 40 EUR. The road to Kokino is fully signposted from the turnoff at the Alexander the Macedonian motorway (the country's other main motorway by the way is named after the 2nd best known …

Basing myself in Kosovo’s capital Pristina, I visited 2 out of the 4 locations that comprise the Medieval Monuments in Kosovo : Gracanica Monastery and Prizren's Our Lady of Ljeviš church. They are considered ‘In Danger’ since 2006 as they need “urgent conservation work” and safeguarding, due to the post-conflict situation which saw this Serbian WHS end up on the territory of the partially recognised state of Kosovo. In the months prior to this trip I had scoured the Internet for information on how to reach the monastery of Gracanica. It lies just 10 kilometers from Pristina, but in a Serb enclave whose surroundings pretend it does not exist. I was almost deterred by the transport issues described in the Lonely Planet chapter on Kosovo (“Rumours abound that bus drivers won’t let you on or off if you tell them where you’re going”) and the stories that run on Tripadvisor about encountering “unwelcoming nuns” at the monastery itself.

Church of Gračanica monastery

In reality it took me a lot of effort and time (2 hours) to get there. But that had more to do with Pristina’s complex public transport …

The “ Natural and cultural heritage of the Ohrid Region ” spans a large area in and around the Macedonian side of Lake Ohrid. The Republic of Macedonia owns about two-thirds of the lake, the remaining third is on Albania’s Tentative List as a transboundary extension . The site includes the lake, towns at the lake shore (such as Struga, Pestani, Trpejca and of course Ohrid itself), and also single monasteries like Sveti Stefan and Sveti Naum. And it encompasses a part of Galičica National Park - a protected natural area that covers the mountains surrounding the lake on the Macedonian side.

Saint Panteleimon monastery

I spent 3 nights in the town of Ohrid, and had 2 full days to explore. On my first day I ‘did’ the cultural circuit in Ohrid itself. First the short hike to the lovely Church of St. John at Kaneo. And then uphill to the archaeological site of Plaošnik. This was a big surprise: about half of the area is subject to archaeological survey or under construction for who knows what. The church of Saint Panteleimon itself is an ‘instoration’ – it was …

In preparation of my ‘Balkan Tour 2015’ I had looked into Albania’s TWHS for ones that would be interesting enough to add to my itinerary. The country currently has a T List of 4, but none of these sites look very promising except the easy extension of the Ohrid WHS into the Albanian side of the lake. The Ancienty City of Apollonia is the most recent addition to the T List, but it is yet another Greek-Roman site. So I had decided to skip them all. But unexpectedly I had half a day to spare on my last day in Albania, due to a late departure of my bus from Tirana to Struga in Macedonia. I used it to get to Durrës and visit the T listed Amphitheatre there.

Amphitheatre of Durrës. The people there were cutting the grass.

Durrës is a port and Albania’s second city, only a 40 minute bus ride away from Tirana. Its amphitheatre lies in the city center, but isn’t as easy to find as many others of its kind. There are one or two signs, but mostly you’re up to yourself discovering the …