Documentation of the city of Toruń for UNESCO World Heritage List – conditions, process of creation, content and form

Abstract

This article presents the circumstances of the process and features of the prepared documentation for the application for the inscription of the Old Town area of Toruń on the UNESCO World Heritage List, authored by Marian Arszynski, PhD, and his team. Last year marked the 25th anniversary of the recognition of the city’s outstanding universal values. Although some of the people involved in this process have already published their recollections, the documentation itself hasnot been analysed so far while it was one of the first studies prepared for the application in a new form. Above all, however, it presents an interesting example of methodology, as prior to the inscription of Toruń as a medieval city – there was no such equivalent, the analysis of which and consequently the documentation could serve as a model for the Toruń study. For the purposes of this article, a number of documents related to the commencement of the process of submitting Toruń’s candi[1]dature were consulted, as well as working materials – including a working copy of the documentation kept at the Department of Conservation
at the Nicolaus Copernicus University. The content of the documents was confronted with information obtained during interviews: with the originator and author, Professor M. Arszynski, but also with two former employees of the Department directly involved in the creation of the document itself: Wiesław Kania and Henryk Ratajczak.