A major step was taken in early February  to safeguard the rich cultural heritage of the city of Shibam in Yemen, in the framework of the Preserving the Unique Earthen Architecture of Shibam project, funded by the ALIPH Foundation, is implemented by The Heritage Management Organization (HERITΛGE) in partnership with the American Foundation for Cultural Research (AFCR) and the General Organization for the Preservation of Historic Cities in Yemen (GOPHCY – Shibam).

Museum experts Shatha Safi and Khulod Najjar visited Shibam to guide the community-led design and  planning of a brand new museum to be created by the project. 

Old City of Shibam: a World Heritage Site

The walled City of Shibam is one of the oldest examples of urban planning based on the principle of vertical construction with impressive tower-like structures  Following years of crisis brought about the war in Yemen, compounded by  and the impact of climate change, this unique UNESCO World Heritage Site is facing significant challenges.

The proposed museum project addresses a request from the General Organization for the Preservation of Historic Cities in Yemen (GOPHCY) to create a centralized space that will bring together collections currently dispersed across several venues in the city. In addition to exhibiting Shibam’s history and artifacts, the museum will feature spaces dedicated to traditional arts and crafts, fostering cultural preservation and engagement. Furthermore, a dedicated room equipped with video-conferencing facilities will enable local residents to participate in online training and conferences. To ensure the sustainability of this training venue, the project will install solar panels and an internet connection, providing continuous access to digital resources.

The experts’ visit marked a crucial phase in the project; three key meetings were held to align the museum’s vision with community expectations and institutional support.

The first meeting focused on establishing a framework for the creation and operation of the museum. It brought together Hassan Aideed– Director General of GOPHCY – Shibam, the Local Committee for Museum Preparation, Hedaya Ghraibeh, Project Manager for HERITΛGE with the two visiting experts. Discussions revolved around how the museum can authentically represent Shibam’s history, traditions, and way of life while aligning with the aspirations of the local community. The experts emphasized the importance of preserving both the material culture—such as architectural heritage—and the stories, customs, and knowledge passed down through generations.

The second meeting allowed the project team, the visiting experts, and GOPHCY-Shibam to discuss the museum  with Tariq Falhum, Director General of Shibam District and his team. This discussion highlighted the role of local authorities in supporting the museum’s development and ensuring its long-term sustainability. By integrating the museum into the broader heritage conservation strategy for Shibam, the project aims to strengthen both cultural preservation and community engagement.

The third meeting was held in coordination with the Women’s Development Administration at the District Office. This session brought together 15 women and girls from diverse backgrounds, including home-based workers, recent graduates, shopkeepers, and others, to discuss the evolution of traditional practices and contemporary lifestyles in Shibam. The conversation explored the challenges faced by women and the transformation of their position in society over time, providing valuable insights into the social and cultural shifts within the community.This meeting plays a vital role in ensuring that the museum accurately represents the experiences, voices, and contributions of women to Shibam’s heritage and daily life.

As the planning and design process continues, Shibam is moving closer to having a dedicated space that tells its story and brings the local community together. 

The project provides  practical, on-the-job training for heritage professionals in Shibam, ensuring that conservation efforts are sustained by skilled local experts. Currently, four trainees are already working alongside our architects and engineers on the documentation process for the South Palace, where the museum will be located. 

The Preserving the Unique Earthen Architecture of Shibam project also includes architectural and infrastructure assessments in the first year, along with an in-depth study on climate action, proposing sustainable strategies for both Shibam and Wadi to ensure long-term resilience and preservation. 

The Heritage Management Organization (HERITΛGE) is happy to announce a series of online training workshops for heritage professionals and caretakers for 2024-2025.  A variety of scholarships and funding opportunities are available. As places are limited, candidates are advised to apply as soon as possible. 

Online Workshop Calendar 2024-2025

Introduction to Heritage Interpretation for Site Managers | 01–03 October 2024 

Master the principles of high-quality heritage interpretation and gain hands-on experience in implementing them at your site/organization in order to create meaningful and unforgettable experiences for visitors. 

Engaging Communities in Cultural Heritage | 11–13 October 2024

Understand the community engagement process,  a key heritage management strategy.  Master the challenges of working with local communities discern between communities and audiences and understand audience segmentation, get introduced to ethnographic approaches to creating collaborative research-based programs, and learn the methods and techniques of oral history to elicit and document tangible and intangible heritage.

Conservation III: Preventive Conservation (pilot)  | 15-17 November 

A pilot workshop only open to heritage managers that have previously completed Conservation II: First Aid for Finds. 

Interpretive Writing for Natural and Cultural Heritage | 25–27 November 2024

Learn how to write text that grabs and holds the reader’s attention. Discover and practice a wide range of techniques to engage visitors and master the techniques of interpretive writing. Participants will work to become a HERITΛGE-accredited Interpretive Writer, after successfully completing, and being assessed on, the exercises and activities.

Project Management for Heritage Managers | 13-15 December 2024

Gain the skills and knowledge to  run a successful project from inception, through the planning and implementation phases to closure. Create a work breakdown structure, a critical path diagram and a Gantt chart. Research potential funders and write a grant application. Improve personal time management skills. Learn to think critically, identify risks and create solutions. 

Organising Temporary Exhibitions from your Collections and Touring Strategies | 14–16 February 2025

The focus of this workshop is to give you the skills to ensure temporary, touring and partnership exhibitions can enhance and promote your institution’s mission, create new audiences and mutually beneficial partnerships. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own exhibition ideas to the workshop for discussion and development.

Communication Strategy and Strategic Marketing for Cultural Organizations | 07-09 March 2025

Join a focused learning experience that provides a systemic approach to successfully attract key audiences’ attention through traditional, new, and social media. Acquire a working guide to effectively communicate news, initiatives, and announcements of your organization and manage communication around a crisis or issue.

Successful Fundraising for Heritage Managers: Strategies and Best Practices | 28-30 March 2025

Start-up and build an organization’s contributed revenue to increase its impact in the world. Participants learn best practices and apply them to create the case for support and letter of inquiry for their own organization or project. Workshop sessions combine live and asynchronous lectures, case studies, class discussions and interactive exercises.

Conservation I: Introduction to the General Principles of Cultural Heritage Conservation | 4-6 April 2025

Learn the fundamentals, the ethics, the evolution, and the contemporary international context of conservation. At the end of the course, participants will be able to understand the potential of conservation, together with the processes which are necessary to maximize it.

Strategic Planning for Heritage Managers  | 9-11 May 2025

Successful strategy can lead to success and this course will provide participants with the tools and methodologies to successfully formulate and implement strategy in organizations managing cultural heritage. Learn the methods and tools of strategic analysis that will enable you devise and evaluate alternative strategic choices and comprehend the demands of a strategy implementation project.

More workshop dates will be announced soon. To apply visit our Executive Leadership Training page. 

The importance of conservation for heritage preservation and management cannot be overstated. Conservation of cultural heritage is not merely about preserving physical objects; it is about safeguarding the messages and values embedded within them.

To delve deeper into this vital field, we are thrilled to announce our new workshop, Conservation II: First Aid for Finds.

This workshop, scheduled for 12-14 April 2024, is an online training program that allows participants from around the globe to engage in an immersive learning experience.

Conservation aims to maintain both the physical and cultural characteristics of an object, ensuring that its intrinsic value remains undiminished over time.

Led by Dr. Alexis Stefanis, Assistant Professor at the Department of Conservation of Antiquities and Works of Art at the University of West Attica, it will focus on providing step-by-step instructions on the best practices for caring for freshly excavated archaeological and historic objects. Moreover, it will address the delicate task of preserving objects belonging to collections that have been recently damaged, as well as offering insights into administering first aid measures to architectural heritage.

Throughout the workshop, participants will delve into essential processes, including preparation, application of treatments, and monitoring. Dr. Stefanis, with his wealth of experience in research projects and numerous publications on conservation, restoration, and rehabilitation of architectural heritage, will guide participants through these intricate procedures.

Find out more information and apply here by 31 March 2024.

**This workshop accompanies our Conservation I: Introduction to the General Principles of Cultural Heritage Conservation workshop that will take place in May 2024.

Philioremos means ‘friend of the solitary’. And when on top of this Minoan peak sanctuary, which dates back to c.1800BC, you can feel why. A hill much lower than the imposing Ida Mountains in the south, it nonetheless commands an impressive 360° view of the surrounding mountain valley. Standing on top, usually ducking to avoid the strong, cold wind, you have the impression of being at a distance from everything. The sounds of sheep bells, fragments of speech, the howl of the wind, a passing car in the distance, a dog barking somewhere, village bells, gradually surround you and make you turn inside, to the sound of your beating heart and your panting breath. It is a sense of solitude that contrasts the criss-crossing networks and flows of people, objects, animals, memories, stories, and official bodies that make up this site. These immaterial flows often make no sound that can be picked up in the natural soundscape of the area. But as one draws near the village, the fragments of sound turn into a profusion of voices.
Gonies used to be a large and strong village up until the 1960s. It is now home to less than 180 inhabitants, mostly elderly. Walking its narrow alleys, may give a first impression of abandonment. Getting to know its people, the Goniotes, however, begins to tell a story of resilience.
We got to know this place through the archaeological lens. Invited to do ethnography as part of the “Three Peak Sanctuaries of Central Crete” archaeological project (https://www.facebook.com/ThreePeakSanctuariesProject/), we hoped to bring up the connections of this group of people with the Minoan past. Traces of human presence in the area since the deep prehistory abound: place names of antiquity, fragmented ancient material culture, important Minoan landmarks, all surround the daily lives of the Goniotes. It soon became evident that the locals were fully aware of the deep past of this place and expressed it in many ways. However, they did not draw a sense of identity from this past. The stories they tell of themselves are stories of mobility and settlement in the past few centuries. They know this place is ancient, but they do not believe they were always here. They are the current stewards of this place’s past rather than being a community of Minoan descent. To our persistent questions about the ancient past, they replied with more and more histories about recent events. This was what was important to them. So, the project gradually turned its attention to what the community wanted to know about itself, its history and heritage.

This shift of focus broadened the scope of our project and made it more inclusive of the community interests, as well as more participatory. In a sense, the community took control over the production of knowledge and turned it into a collective process. It is this collaborative venture that prompted us to create a field school that enables the locals to teach their own history and heritage to students from all over the world.
We opted for the form of a field school rather than a lecture-based one to open up the process of collective ethnographic learning. On a daily basis, students, scholars and locals share experiences, discussions, celebrations, mournings, and stories, for a month every summer since 2014, contributing this way to the creation of a community-controlled archive of knowledge.
The simple act of having a local point at a wall and tell its story, give a guided tour of the village, describe the process of recognising his own sheep from those of others, and commenting on the effects of urbanization and development, broadens the gamut of educators in the village. Everybody can be a teacher. The subjects discussed are chosen by the speakers themselves. We usually give prompts, discussing the subject of each year’s school with people in the village.
Locals impart knowledge we do not and cannot have, the embodied experience of dwelling in this landscape for decades. And we impart our own experience of dwelling in a space that is sustained by the pull of theoretical activity in academia and the realities of being in the field. Knowledge production, collaborative research is a more encompassing praxis. It involves talking to people, forging and maintaining relationships, resolving conflicts. For some people in the village, the summer school is a highlight of their seasonal life, an encounter they look forward to. An occasion when the village resonates with voices, when some houses in the neighbourhood have lights on again at night. We create a multidisciplinary space between history, archaeology, art, museum studies, archival research, and oral history that leads to incredibly rich research contexts.
From the very beginning, our work was geared towards improving the livelihood of the people in the village either directly or indirectly. In the first season of our field school (2014), we collaborated with the Technical University of Crete, Department of Social Work, to provide a detailed census of the medical provisions and the needs of the village inhabitants. This census helped the social services of the Malevizi Municipality to plan better the health care for the village inhabitants, who on a weekly basis visit the elderlies’ home (KAΠH), used for physiotherapy and occupational therapy sessions, gatherings, creative activities and small feasts.
Simultaneously, during the first year of our field school, the archaeologist-artist Vasko Demou collaborated with us to implement a public art installation. It was based on ethnographic information provided by the locals about pastimes, landmarks and habitual practices, and gave us the opportunity to express this collectively created knowledge in forms beyond the conventional ethnographic ways.
This art installation, that took the form of a mapped itinerary in the village, was expanded in the following years into a trail that incorporated several interesting stops along the way, which reflected the embodied knowledge of the locals. Retracing the guided walks that the locals gave to us and the field school students, the trail was a way to transmit this knowledge to the visiting public. A communally created map was an opportunity for underplayed aspects of local heritage to be presented on an equal part with more male-dominated understandings of history when, for example, village ovens and the village’s springs were put alongside the heroic feats of 19th century brigands, thus creating discussion in the village about how exactly their heritage works.
Engaging the locals in the production and representation of ethnographic and archaeological knowledge finds fertile ground in community art projects, such as the one we implemented in 2015. The archaeologist Celine Murphy, specialising in Minoan clay figurines, in collaboration with the experienced potter Vasilis Politakis implemented a three-week workshop that involved locals and visitors in the collection, preparation and working of clay.
Within the framework of experimental archaeology, participants were asked to emulate the possible techniques used to make clay figurines. Embodied memory appeared to be a very important parameter of this workshop because a number of elderly Goniotes showed us the clay working techniques they used in their childhood in order to make their toys and utensils.
The artefacts created by the locals were presented in an open-air exhibition, which added to the already-existing path in the village, with the ultimate aim to turn the village into an open-air museum.
Art practice helps us create uncommon research situations by setting up hubs in the village that bring together individuals of different generations and backgrounds, and evoke embodied memories and techniques as well as personal narratives and stories, while they result in the creation of a communally produced work of art.
In 2016, the artist in residence, Aleka Karavela, and one of our former students and curator, Katerina Konstantinou, transformed a room in the abandoned school into an open studio with looms donated by the village. In the “loom project” men and women of all ages collectively weaved a cloth.

At the end of the field school, instead of making a presentation about the project’s outcome, we chose to put words to a traditional motif sung for the first time by Nathenoyannis and recorded in the village by the Swiss ethnomusicologist Samuel Baud Bovy in 1953-1954. This song was sung during the feast closing our research season in the village.
Alongside the weaving project, in the 2017 field season landscape was also a topic for exploration. Having experienced first-hand the locals’ relationship with their natural surroundings, we did not conceive landscape as a mere geographical space but as a cultural concept and a set of values significant to the local inhabitants. Some of the older ones, who know the area very well and have been walking it since childhood, gave our team a series of guided walks on what used to be the old paths that connected Gonies with the valley. In these walks we managed to acquire a sense of the landscape as a social and cultural construct modelled and embodied by the people who use it, live off of it and experience it on a daily basis. This unique natural, social and cultural entanglement helped us create a series of interpretive panels and signs, setting up a cultural heritage trail inspired by local knowledge and based on local narratives.
The ethnographic information we collected about knowledge on raw materials, techniques and local produce made us want to explore further the relationship of memory and material culture in the 2017 season. Memory in the village is often carried through material objects and artefacts. From a small handmade leather sack, the so-called sakadelo, that contains the utensils necessary to the shepherds’ everyday needs, spring not only objects but stories, reminiscences, sometimes even songs.
Unpacking the family trunk is like a stratigraphy of layered personal and historical memories. The 2017 season focused on exactly that: the materiality of things and their anchoring of memory.
Introducing, for the first time, visual documentation into the study of material culture and memory, we created a series of interviews on camera with the aid of our photographer in residence, Manolis Kandanoleon. This resulted in the creation of the community’s oral history archive, which we will continue to enrich in the following field school seasons.
Everything we collected this season relating to memories, visual images and material culture were great sources for the design of a small-scale exhibition as part of the closing ceremony of our field school. The exhibition comprised of various daily life objects kindly donated to us by the Goniotes, a number of oral narratives, artistic drawings and video projections.
There were times in the process of the exhibition design that it felt odd to be so self-referential, seemingly attempting to display to the village inhabitants elements familiar to them, closely relating to themselves and their lives. We often wondered what the purpose of such an exhibition would be, especially because our aim was not to simply display the tangible and intangible elements they shared with us but to present our ethnographic information and our experience of their own life experiences in new interpretive ways. Working and thinking in a self-reflexive manner is a core part of ethnographic research and thus it soon became clear to us that the exhibition could act as a field that voices the merge of our own contextualisation with the contexts that the locals communicate to us, relating to gender issues, love, emotion, belief, reminiscences, and practices.
Within the framework of Greek archaeological research, the fields of public/community archaeology and archaeological ethnography are two largely underdeveloped research arenas, mainly due to legal and institutional entanglements. Rather than perpetuate this problem, in the international field school we acknowledge local communities as integral constituents of the field, since they directly or indirectly influence our research questions as well as the processes and progress of our study. By co-producing and co-managing approaches of the ancient or more recent past with the local community, we end up with richer, less clinical, and more locally relevant results.
We would like to express our gratitude to the Community and the Cultural Association of Gonies, all the village inhabitants, our artists in residence and the participants in the field school. Without them, this project would not have been materialized and enriched, allowing us to further our engagement with the village community in the years to come.
Written by
Aris ANAGNOSTOPOULOS
University of Kent, The Heritage Management Organisation
Eleni STEFANOU
Hellenic Open University, The Heritage Management Organisation
Evangelos KYRIAKIDIS
University of Kent, The Heritage Management Organisation