The Fight for Windmills. Individual Efforts to Preserve a Troublesome Cultural Heritage in Poland

In the proposed presentation, we focus on two cases of people who strive to preserve the material cultural heritage in the form of old windmills. To achieve this goal, they must convince the local community, visiting tourists and, above all, the authorities and potential sponsors about the uniqueness of the facility they care for.

Using the association with the classical topos and Alfred Schutz's classical analyses of Don Quixote, we try to analyze how the caretakers of windmills reduce the dissonance between the dominant discourses of foreignness (a German windmill), backwardness (a wooden structure) and otherness (a windmill different from all the others in the area) and the positive discourse of caring for local heritage, a testament to ancient craftsmanship and progress and the exceptional skills of ancestors.

The fight to preserve the windmill may seem like a fight against windmills in its metaphorical sense. It involves not only efforts to preserve the windmill materially, but also requires reformulating its meaning, its history.

We compare the case of a private wooden windmill, which is passed down in a family from generation to generation and, although it is no longer economically useful, is an important point of reference for the family and local heritage with the case of a brick windmill with a wooden mechanism, which passed from hand to hand between owners from different countries and with different ideas for its development.

The modern Don Quixote does not fight windmills, but fights to preserve windmills, which are not only becoming a troublesome heritage due to their contemporary uselessness in production and the costs of their maintenance and renovation, but also because of the memory of things, due to the difficult history they bear witness to and which they evoke.