Heritage and Museum Picks
- EPOCH
- 2 days ago
- 10 min read
The EPOCH Editorial Team
The summer break in the academic year gives historians and historically minded people the perfect opportunity to take a break from their work and enjoy a holiday, or at the very least some well deserved time away from their offices. So where do many of us go? To sun-kissed beaches, island retreats, alpine lodges, and spa weekends? Not likely! More often than not, the answer is a visit to some form of museum or heritage site.
Since Issue 21 of EPOCH is themed around the subjects of ‘Heritage and Memory’, we have turned once again to our Editorial Team to ask them to explain some of their favourite museums, exhibitions, heritage sites, and objects. As several of the articles in this issue have shown, heritage and museum work is far from easy, with museum professionals often working to preserve delicate objects and histories in underfunded institutions with societal pressures to present objects in a certain light or to tell a particular story. This editorial captures the complexities of museums and heritage sites around the globe, with insights into ancient cities, overlooked literary figures, industrial Britain, and a communist ‘Disneyland’.
The Ruins of Ephesus, Turkey
Jimyeong-Kim Jin
Ephesus, on Turkey’s Aegean coast near the modern town of Selçuk, is one of the Mediterranean’s best-preserved ancient cities. Once a flourishing port and Roman provincial capital, today it offers visitors a striking window into the classical world.
Ephesus was founded during the tenth-century BC by Greek settlers and was later absorbed into the Roman Republic in 129 BC. The city soon became famous for its monumental architecture and bustling trade. Over the centuries, the Küçükmenderes River silted up the harbour, cutting it off from the sea and hastening the city’s decline, yet the ruins remain as testimony to its former glory.
Ephesus is a city of layered stories. It was home to the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and later a major centre of early Christianity, famously receiving Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians in the New Testament. Walking its marble streets today reveals both imperial Roman power and early Christian heritage side by side—from the grand Library of Celsus to churches built atop older temples. These layers invite visitors to reflect on how places change and develop new meaning over time.
When I visited, the scale and preservation of the ruins was breathtaking. At the site of the Temple of Artemis, once among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, only a single column remains—now topped with a bird’s nest. It rises alone quietly in an open field, a stark contrast to the temple’s former magnificence. The Library of Celsus, with its grand exterior and towering marble columns, still conveys the cultural ambition and wealth of the Roman city. Yet among these grand structures, what surprised me most was the overwhelming sense of time itself: cities built with ambition, transformed through empires and faiths, and eventually abandoned to silence. Ephesus lives now not through its function, but through its remains—and in the act of remembering.
Further Reading
Charles River, Ancient Ephesus: The History and Legacy of One of Antiquity’s Greatest Cities (South Carolina: CreateSpace, 2015).
Canterbury’s Lopsided Literary Heritage
Vincent Kennedy
Sometime in the fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer travelled to Kent, leaving his birth city of London to fulfil his new governmental vocation in the face of a possible invasion from the French. It is while living in Kent that Chaucer is thought to have written his most enduring and defining work, The Canterbury Tales.
Cemented into Canterbury are snapshots of its rich literary history: the Marlowe Theatre watches over boaters punting down the river, fronted by Rick Kirby’s sculpture ‘Bulkhead.’ A huge steel face created from scrapped ships, it was designed to allude to Christopher Marlowe’s metaphor of a ‘face that launch’d a thousand ships’. A few streets away, The Cook’s Tale restaurant plays on an identical title from The Canterbury Tales.
These are modern-day nods that serve to make visible that which is already vivid: Chaucer and Marlowe are exciting subjects, recognisable names that lend gravitas to Canterbury’s historic cobbled roads and narrow shop-lined streets. More literary history lurks within Canterbury’s , but we may never know where that history began. The city’s heritage does not represent them. Early Modern Canterbury was a nest for influential writers: they were born and baptised in the city, grew up in its streets, and aged into ambition, turning to London to pursue writing, drama, and culture. Christopher Marlowe had this life.
So did John Lyly and Stephen Gosson.
Lyly and Gosson were born around a decade before Marlowe, each having a profound effect on the London playwriting scene in almost opposite directions: Lyly was a great influence on Shakespeare and was one of the ‘University Wits’, a group of Oxford- or Cambridge-educated dramatists whose classical education influenced their writing; Gosson, on the other hand, wrote anti-theatrical pieces condemning stage plays, contributing to the movement that led to the closure of theatres in 1642.
These three writers all emerged from Canterbury, yet only Marlowe’s name survives there today. The only steeples of this history are what remains of the churches in which they were baptised. Lyly’s church, St Alphege’s, is not accessible to the public. All that survives of Marlowe and Gosson’s church, St George’s, is the tower, upon which a plaque naming only Marlowe is mounted; the church was damaged during the bombing raids of World War II, which also impacted Canterbury Cathedral.
Marlowe’s childhood home, which was almost directly opposite St George’s Church, was also destroyed by the bombing. The location of Gosson’s home is currently not known, and, while we know the name of Lyly’s house to be ‘the Splayed Eagle’, even its location is not precise: Lyly’s house was either on Sun Street, just off from the Cathedral, or Palace Street a little further north.
When you visit Canterbury, you are cognizant of Marlowe’s name and can walk past a statue of Chaucer. Lyly and Gosson’s histories, though, are unseen. They do not yet possess any stake in the heritage of the city they hailed from: you could walk past Lyly’s home and never know.
Further Reading
Park Honan, Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Ton Hoenselaars (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Kerry Brown, ‘Geoffrey Chaucer: Never Quite Getting to Canterbury’, Kent Literature, 23 May 2020 https://kentliterature.com/geoffrey-chaucer-never-quite-getting-to-canterbury/.
Preserving the Mundane – ‘Bauxite No.2’
Alex Pomeroy
This year is the semicentennial of the National Railway Museum’s opening in York in 1975. Situated in within the former locomotive depot and other ex-railway buildings, the museum’s opening heralded an important step in spreading ‘national museums’ across the nation, rather than siting them exclusively in London. Their vast collection contains thousands of items, from locomotives and rolling stock to uniforms and paperwork, each a piece of a two-hundred-year-old railway-related jigsaw.
The locomotives and rolling stock are the star attractions. Upon visiting York, or their sister museum, ‘Locomotion’ in Shildon, County Durham, visitors are confronted with a stunning array of ‘celebrity’ locomotives which chart the development of the most elegant form of rail travel – the express passenger service. From the Great Northern Railway’s 1870-built ‘single-wheeler’ No.1, to Sir Kenneth Grange’s famous Class 43 (the locomotives that powered the InterCity 125 trains) of 1975, these locomotives are beautifully preserved and ornamentally polished. Even the more utilitarian types, such as the Southern Railway’s austere wartime Q1 locomotive No.C1, are kept in spotless condition.
In their working lives, the vast majority of rail vehicles were covered in varying levels of filth as Britain’s railways steadily declined during the twentieth century. Object No.1953-354 tells precisely this story. Rather than being restored to typical museum condition, ‘Bauxite No.2’ was preserved as it was in when withdrawn from service as a shunting locomotive for International Aluminium Co. Ltd in 1947 to provide visitors with a representation of a hard-working steam locomotive.
Small industrial locomotives like ‘Bauxite No.2’ were the Ford ‘Transit’ vans of their era, thousands were built by dozens of locomotive builders across Great Britain to satisfy the needs of industrial firms and contractors. Employed on a myriad of projects, from reservoir construction to coal mining, they were simply treated as industrial plant and disposed of when they had served their purpose. Built in 1874 by Black, Hawthorn & Co Ltd of Gateshead in North East England, ‘Bauxite No.2’ had a working life of seventy-three years and its condition reflects its harsh working environment. Its name reflects its purpose, to shunt wagonloads of bauxite (the raw material from which aluminium is produced) around the International Aluminium Co.’s works in Hebburn, not far from Gateshead. The large ‘dumb’ buffers for shunting a variety of wagons around tight curves are badly damaged and buckled, whilst the paintwork has faded through decades of hard work and neglect. The chimney shows signs of patchwork repair, the smokebox door is dented, and the cab provides only the most essential comfort for the crew.
A far cry from the many larger, more prestigious locomotives within the National Collection, ‘Bauxite No.2’ is nonetheless a vital part in the story of British railways and industrial Britain. The National Railway Museum is currently undergoing a major project of expansion projected for completion in 2027. This will enable a greater array of objects to be displayed to the public, many for the very first time. Within the stories of high-speed expresses, glamourous royal trains, and powerful freight locomotives, it is pertinent that we remember the tough, filthy, and often dangerous conditions experienced by railway workers for decades across Britain and the world for many decades.
Further Reading
Gordon Edgar, Industrial Locomotives & Railways of The North East (Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2019).
Memento Park – Budapest, Hungary
Jude Rowley
On the south-western outskirts of Budapest, an open-air museum presents tourists with a rare opportunity to come face-to-face with Vladimir Lenin, or with similarly emblematic local communist icons like Béla Kun. Opened in 1993, less than four years after the Hungarian People’s Republic was dissolved, Memento Park was designed by its architect Ákos Eleőd to provide a home for out of favour communist-era monuments from across the Hungarian capital. It serves as a compromise, a way of keeping the monuments out of public view while ensuring they remain accessible for those seeking to connect with material remnants of Hungary’s twentieth century past.
At the height of the Cold War, no Eastern European city centre was complete without prominent statues of communist leaders. Whether cast in bronze or concrete, such statues, invariably sculpted in a socialist realist style, were a prominent feature of the urban environment across the Eastern Bloc.
As the political landscape changed, some cities opted to destroy their statues entirely, with Prague’s Stalin Monument dramatically demolished with explosives as early as 1962. Others, such as Minsk, left them in situ, where they remain to this day. Some cities sought a middle ground: a way of balancing calls to preserve historical monuments against demands to tear down remnants of communism. In Odessa, for instance, a statue of Lenin was famously refashioned to resemble Darth Vader in 2015. However, in Hungary, where every town once hosted a Lenin statue, former communist monuments have been repurposed to create a major heritage site. In the early 1990s, over forty statues were relocated from the heart of Budapest to the park, in an attempt to create a living museum of Hungary’s communist past.
Visitors to Memento Park encounter a slightly surreal combination between an open-air cemetery and a bizarre communist Disneyland. Though not a theme park per se, it is a self-described ‘thematic museum’ and, aside from the historical gravity of the monuments, cannot escape feelingly slightly kitsch. Tourists can pose behind the wheel of a Trabant 601 or visit a small stall selling an assortment of old Soviet Komsomol badges.
The statues themselves are the central attraction, and there is something impressive about directly encountering these historical monuments at close proximity. However, once the novelty of coming face-to-face with Lenin wears off, the whole thing starts to feel slightly artificial. The statues, yanked from their surroundings, are detached from their context. They were designed to be encountered in the day-to-day city environment, as part of a complex relationship between art, politics, and urban space. Removed from this, it is hard to grasp their historical significance.
This is best symbolised by the 1947 statue of the Liberating Soviet Soldier, erected to commemorate the defeat of Nazi occupation. Modelled on a Red Army soldier (Vasily Ivanovich Golovtsov), the statue once stood guard underneath the Liberty Statue on Gellért Hill, possibly Budapest's most famous monument. Removed as part of the ‘de-Sovietification’ of the monument, it now stands atop gravel in Memento Park, standing guard only to some ornamental bushes.
Left: A 1958 cast bronze copy at Memento Park of Zsigmond Kisfaludi Strobl's 1947 statue ‘Liberating Soviet Soldier’ (Felszabadító szovjet katona), which once formed part of the ‘Liberty Statue’ (Szabadság Szobor) on Gellért Hill in Budapest. (Credit: Author’s photo). Right: The original version of the same statue situated in its original location as part of the ‘Liberty Statue’, photographed in 1953. (Fortepan/UVATERV, reproduced under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license).
The original soldier statue was torn down during the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, so the Memento Park statue is the 1958 copy which replaced it after Soviet-backed order was restored. In 2025, its former location was filled with a large Christian cross on the orders of Viktor Orbán’s right-wing government, demonstrating that memorialisation in Budapest remains contested.
Memento Park should be understood in this context of contested heritage. It is a compromise, rather than an ideal solution. Three decades since it opened, it has become a monument in its own right: a symbol of heritage, memorialisation, and ongoing attempts to grapple with the past.
Further Reading
Ákos Réthly (ed.), In the Shadow of Stalin’s Boots: Visitors’ Guide to Memento Park (London: Private Planet, 2010).
