Schwerin (dpa/mv) – Schwerin’s World Heritage application has taken an important step forward: the 250-page application dossier has been completed and translated into English, as Mayor Rico Badenschier (SPD) announced on Thursday evening at a public information event in the courtyard of the castle . On August 15, it will be handed over to the Schwerin Ministry of Education and in September it will be sent to UNESCO for preliminary testing. On February 1, 2023, the documents were officially handed over in Paris. The decision as to whether Schwerin should be included in the World Heritage List should be made in 2024.
Schwerin is applying with its residence ensemble of the Mecklenburg dukes, which has grown over 200 years. The focus is on the palace, the surrounding gardens and parks, the cathedral, government buildings, theatre, museum, several city palaces and ducal barracks, houses of purveyors to the court – a total of around 35 objects, most of them from the 19th century, such as the coordinator of the Schwerin World Heritage application, Linda Holung said.
After a long process of sharpening, it was a good application that should meet UNESCO’s scientific criteria, said Holung, who took office at the end of 2020. The residence ensemble meets two of the four Unesco criteria for world heritage sites: as a unique testimony to a lost culture and as an architectural ensemble that symbolizes one or more periods of human history.
The residence ensemble has been preserved in a unique unity and also includes many functional buildings of the time, emphasized the coordinator. The entire ensemble of residences spread across the historic city center is intertwined. Schwerin’s historical center had not suffered any bomb damage during World War II.
The city of Schwerin had changed central content in its application for inclusion in the UNESCO World Heritage in the last few meters. The idea of ??a “cultural landscape of romantic historicism”, which had been pursued for years, was rejected a few months ago. Instead, the focus was now placed on the grown residence ensemble with buildings from the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.
The application was supplemented by three buildings from the former purveyors to the court, Uhle, Wöhler and Krefft. Former components such as the grinding mill and the island of Hakenwerder in Lake Schwerin were deleted. They did not meet the UNESCO criteria, it said.
The Hanseatic cities of Wismar and Stralsund from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania are on the Unesco list of world heritage sites.
