The Zemgale Planning Region (ZPR) team of the “Military Heritage II” project in September participated in meetings and organized a seminar. Also, intensive work continues with the survey of military heritage tourism sites.
Active work on the survey of tourism objects in the region is still ongoing, which includes visiting each object, taking photos, as well as creating a description that would be both interesting and concise enough to be included in tourism materials and be appealing to people. The goal of the project is to develop several comprehensive tourism materials (travel map, guide and updated militaryheritage.com website), covering all the Baltic States. The basis of this tourism offer is various places of military heritage open to visitors – former military bases, coast guard buildings, bunkers of forest brothers, battlefields, museums, collections, etc., starting from the period from the beginning of the First World War.
On September 10 and 11, the project partners met in Klaipėda, Lithuania, to discuss the completed works and the progress of the project. As previously reported, partners from southern Latvia and Lithuania have united in the project. The project partners also visited military heritage tourism sites in Lithuania.
Furthermore, on September 12, ZPR organized seminar “Development of a military heritage tourism product and creation of a cooperation network in the Zemgale region”. Its purpose was to introduce the owners of military heritage objects, entrepreneurs and tourism specialists of Zemgale to the main benefits of cooperation and promotion of military heritage. Juris Smaļinskis presented the mapping, descriptions and collection of photographs of military heritage objects on the website https://militaryheritagetourism.info/en created by the rural tourism association “Lauku ceļotājs”.
The participants of the seminar had the opportunity to learn about the tourist objects of military heritage in the Zemgale region. For example, Raitis Ābelnieks, head of the Bauska Museum’s History Department, presented examples of such heritage in Bauska county, while historian Andris Tomašūns presented the military heritage sites and objects of Jelgava and the county. The second part of the seminar was held in one of the most popular and well-known objects of the Jelgava county – the Christmas Battles Museum, where the participants had the opportunity to see the tourism object accompanied by the museum’s manager, Dagnis Dedumietis. It is interesting that already at the beginning of the summer, ZPR publicly invited interested parties who know various military heritage tourism objects or memories to respond. Although we received several messages, right after this seminar, the participants shared many new objects that they know. Therefore, active work on the survey of such objects will only continue.
Also, already in October, the project team and representatives of 2 involved parties went on an experience exchange trip to Estonia to learn the results of the previous project, when the military heritage tourism objects were identified in this country and in the northern part of Latvia. Several places on the Estonian island where the events of the Second World War took place was also visited.
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