Zoe:
Gdańsk is retrying to be listed under a different theme, I'm not 100% and Paul will probably chime in with details but they were rejected before
Indeed - rather strange!!
1. The Polish T List Entry is for "
Gdansk - Town of Memory and Freedom" . This had been nominated n 2007 but was withdrawn. It contains
a. A "complex of buildings in the Main Town" (Churches, chapels, mansions etc etc
b. A "Remembrance site. Westerplatte Peninsula - the place where WWII began"
c. A "Remembrance site. The part of Gdansk Shipyard associated with the emergence of Solidarity movement together with the Monument ot the Fallen Shipyard Workers
2. But the List of sites nominated in Jan 2019 for consideration at the 2020 WHC was for a site titled "T
he Gdańsk Shipyard – the birthplace of "Solidarity" and the symbol of the fall of Communism in East-Central Europe". So it appears that Gransk has pushed ahead just with "c" from the original T List site
3. However, the Papers for this year's WHC show that the nomination was regarded as "Incomplete"!!! I can find absolutely no reference to this fact in any article on the Web (despite searching in Polish!!). The inclusion of this site as a possibility for the 2021 WHC is therefore based on an assumption that Poland will have sorted out the problems by then and will proceed rather than confirmed information that it will be carried forward to 2021.
4. It appears that there has been a long running battle in Gdansk over the future of the Shipyard with developments of apartments and shopping centres etc potentially replacing everything "old". On the other side have been conservationists who want to keep at least a part of the old site because of its significance in Polish, European and World history and a campaign was created to save a historic crane etc.
This article "
Save the Cranes! Cultural Heritage in the Gdansk Shipyard" provides a good overview of the shipyard and of what has happened to it up to 2014.
5. In May 2018 there
came announcements that the Shipyard would be nominated for WH status. The article is in Polish - a couple of (auto!!) translations from it - "
I want to say one thing. For 2.5 years I have been fighting with the fact that the conservator is not an enemy. The conservator is a friend of investors and all interested parties (...) We hope that in the beautiful, historic buildings of the Imperial Shipyard, which has recently been entered into the register of monuments, shops, services, apartments will be built - in a word that life will be there "- Gawin pointed out." (Magdalena Gawin Deputiy Minister of Culture and National Heritage). And "
if everything goes well and it could be worked out by the end of January 2019, then the chance to recognize the Shipyard Gdańsk as a World Heritage Site could take place at the turn of June and July 2020."
6. Completion of the Nomination by Jan 2019 would look to have been an impossibly tight timescale given that the announcement included statements like "
We want to start this dialogue, the conclusion can not be prepared in isolation from the local reality, people who live and work here every day"
7. Nevertheless it appears that a Nomination was indeed sent to Paris in Jan 2019. This
report of a Europa Nostra meeting in March 2019 refers to how good the Nomination file was!!! ("
The IEHC members were impressed by the quality of the nomination file which was submitted to UNESCO in January 2019, presenting the outstanding universal value of the Gdansk shipyard in a convincing manner")
8. But not good enough unfortunately!! As late as
19 MayMay 2019 Ms Gawan was still making statements about the nomination. The "incomplete" assessment of course became public when the 2019 WHC papers were published in Jun 2019 - but since then - nothing.
9. One can see significant problems for such a nomination - a very high element of "Associative Value", loss of much of the historic fabric already, continuing development and a subject (Shipyard) which, apart from that associative value, isn't that special.
10. We really need someone with knowledge of the local politics to tell us more about the drivers behind this nomination.