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intothelocallabantery · 4 years

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Getting a Grip on Cultural Heritage Sites

A green door opens on an old street in the city of Groningen, the Netherlands, and a black and pink racing bike is wheeled out by a student named Cato. Outside, two gentlemen are waiting for her, her older brother and her boyfriend. Together, they will go on a long bike ride through the local countryside with a clear aim in mind. Cato asks the guys if they are ready to go and with that they all step on their sports bikes and start riding south. The weather is pleasantly warm and the wind not too harsh, perfect cycling conditions.

With the sun on her face, Cato thinks back to the Netflix show she was just watching, ‘La Casa de Papel’. The newest season has just dropped and she is very excited to start watching again, as the themes are so intriguing to her. It is a story about criminals who rob a bank and try to get away with doing so. The show plays with Cato’s emotions as she notices that even though she feels extremely bad for the hostages of the bank, she is rooting for the robbers and what they stand for. She loves the types of stories that make you look at things from a different perspective. Cato reminds herself that even though she loves watching the show, it would be harrowing to be in such a situation herself and that freedom is so important. However, the desire for freedom is also why the robbers in ‘La Casa de Papel’ started the crime. Sometimes, things like right and wrong are not as black and white as she would like and things are more complex.

Beautiful countryside surrounds Cato and while she looks around she thinks back to the last (guest) lecture that she had, about the train hijacking of 1977 in the Punt. About fifty people were held hostage by nine members of the Moluccan community for twenty days, this is another case where Cato finds it difficult to think of the hijackers as just the bad guys. Even though she thinks the crime is despicable, the Dutch government did not live up to their promises (to give them their own country) and have the Moluccans live in poor conditions for 25 years. She understands that people got angry about that and that they wanted to do something about it.

Cato has arrived in the small town of ‘the Punt’, and rides around for a little bit. There is no evidence in this town that something horrible happened close to the town. After the near 20km cycle ride, she is due for a break and sits down at a picnic table just outside of the town. Cato wonders why she was not able to find any reference to the horrible events and while doing so she can hear the words from a text she read about this from González in her mind: “heritage is presented as a neutral concept loaded with positive or negative meaning depending on whether the official or unofficial heritage of the oppressed is concerned” (p.21). She wonders if the reason that it is invisible is because of the negative or positive meaning the heritage site may hold for the people, and having the site be heritage is too complex, so not having any evidence might be easier.

Now fueled by dark chocolate and some water, Cato starts a new journey, to the train tracks where it happened. Unfortunately, she is unable to find direct coordinates and decides to go to the closest train track to the Punt. After a walk through the field that connects the road with the tracks, she is looking at an empty train track, just like any she has seen before. She sees no evidence of any event taking place there. She considers crossing the tracks as the guest lecturer said that there are bullet holes in one of the poles, but decides against it due to fear of trains/death. She stands in front of the tracks for a while and thinks about the horrors that took place years prior, but notices that it is hard to do so because there is no evidence left. So, she leaves.

Cato starts her journey back home, now fueled by annoyance that the hijacking events seem to be erased from the past and that there is no place where one can reflect on the incident. Using Garden’s notion of the heritagescape that she had to read for one of her courses, Cato starts to plan a way to manifest a heritage site at the Punt. She thinks it is so important to make the train tracks a heritage site because “The lack of a full appreciation of the heritage site as a place will also have serious repercussions because without this it will remain difficult to break down the heritage site and examine its constituent parts” (396). In her mind, Cato goes through the basic aspects that a heritage site should have by Garden: “(i) how the individual site operates and portrays the past, (ii) how one (or more) site(s) operate relative to another and finally (iii) lead to a better understanding of the heritage site as a larger concept and as a cultural phenomenon” (397). Using this, Cato thinks it would be best to make the walk from the road up to the train tracks an outdoor museum with information boards placed along the way. This way, there is information for those interested in read without disturbing its nature too much. She thinks it is important to have information, stories, and background knowledge about the hijacking to open the space for both communities. Mainly, Cato thinks it is crucial for something to be done, as otherwise history would be forgotten... and that is a true crime.

After all of this pondering, Cato has finished the long cycle and has arrived home. She and her bike go inside and the green door closes.

Works Cited

Garden, Mary-Catherine E. “The Heritagescape: Looking at Landscapes of the Past,”

González, Pablo Alonso. "The Emergence of Heritage." In The Heritage Machine: Fetishism and Domination in Maragateria, Spain, 17-67. London: Pluto Press, 2019. Accessed June 3, 2020. doi:10.2307/j.ctv86dhrk.6.

Hans Peters (ANEFO). Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Rijksfotoarchief: Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands Fotopersbureau (ANEFO), 1945-1989 - negatiefstroken zwart/wit, nummer toegang 2.24.01.05, bestanddeelnummer 929-2101

International Journal of Heritage Studies 12, no. 5 (2006):394-411.

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