Cultural Heritage Seal

The Oderbruch - people make landscape

In 2022, the Oderbruch will be the first cultural landscape to receive the European Heritage Seal. The seal is awarded to the landscape as cultural heritage because the ideals and history of the EU are symbolized here in a special way.

Under the title "The Oderbruch - People Make Landscape", the cultural landscape presents itself as a concise example of the anthropogenic shaping of landscapes in European history. As a clearly definable and largest settled river polder in Europe, it has a spatially transcending water system, a so-called landscape machine, which integrates technical elements from more than 250 years in an extension of almost 1,000 square kilometers. The settlement history of the Oderbruch has been reflected in an extraordinarily high density of architectural monuments and is still very legible for visitors today in the form of fishing villages, colonist villages and loosely built farmsteads. In the self-image of free farmers, responsible for their own existence, the colonists continue to shape a rural democracy that is characterized by a high level of cultural and communal political vitality. Since the Prussian internal colonization of the 18th century, the population of the Oderbruch has been repeatedly enriched by immigration until today.


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European history

The Oderbruch is exemplary for the future of rural areas in Europe. From a historical perspective, the cultural landscape also owes its existence to the most advanced engineering knowledge in Europe in the 18th century. It stands for an appropriation of nature on a large scale, laborious yet sustainable, because its water system has been steadily optimized and made more environmentally compatible over ten generations, through system breaks and wars. Immigration from many parts of Europe has made the Oderbruch a particularly diverse rural area today: a Little Europe.

Communicate European significance

This is one of the core questions in the application. In 2016, the Oderbruch Museum Altranft - Workshop for Rural Culture began to establish a network of Heritage sites which today is the most important basis for an attractive mediation offer. The offer is aimed at both residents and tourists. The designated cultural heritage sites are the cultural tourism highlights of the Oderbruch. Together they present themselves in a Exhibition in the Oderbruch Museum and in the guidebook Look into the fracture (Zajrzyj na Łęgi). Every year, the heritage sites host Partner projects with various event offers takes place.

The interest of young people should also be aroused. In the Landscape education educational opportunities are created for young people. Students present the heritage sites in the film series Youth films cultural heritage in front of. The children's quarry "How I discovered the mermaid and ran up with the dike" explains the Oderbruch to the children using a landscape puzzle. You can find more educational offers here.

Contact

Municipal Working Group Cultural Heritage Oderbruch
Coordination Office
c/o Museum Society Altranft e.V.

Schneiderstrasse 18
16259 Bad Freienwalde OT Altranft

Phone: 03344 1553901
info@kulturerbe-oderbruch.de

An initiative of the Oderbruch Museum Altranft - Workshop for Rural Culture and the Municipal Working Group Cultural Heritage Oderbruch. With the support of the counties
Märkisch-Oderland and Barnim, the cities of Bad Freienwalde (Oder), Seelow and Wriezen