Fallowed heritage. The past and presents of the State Agricultural Farms in Poland

The paper offers the first regular exploration of Poland’s State Agricultural Farms (pol. Państwowe Gospodarstwo Rolne, hereafter PGR) within critical heritage studies. Despite a growing interest in socialist heritage, current heritagization efforts prioritise artistic values and elite narratives, leaving rural and agricultural landscapes, such as PGRs, marginalised. By presenting an attempt at typology of contemporary PGRs – museum-adapted, repurposed and ruined – the paper introduces the concept of fallowed heritage – disturbing, unwanted and neglected within official heritage discourses, largely due to its associations with agriculture under the Soviet rule in East-Central Europe. This study combines critical heritage studies and critical animal studies to investigate PGRs not only as politicised material remnants but also as sites of multispecies entanglements involving human and non-human actors under Soviet-style agricultural production. Drawing from fieldwork, archival research and interviews, the study contextualises PGRs within Poland’s socio-economic transformation after 1989 and examines their erasure from memory, despite their rich potential to shed light on the complex history in the region. By tracing their transformation from collectivised agricultural estates to symbols of ineffectiveness and decay, this paper underscores the significance of PGRs as a critical, though neglected, element of East-Central European heritage landscape and calls for their re-examination within broader frameworks of social, cultural and environmental history.