RESTORY has undertaken various research initiatives to investigate the emotionally charged connection between community and cultural heritage. Principal activities encompassed archival research, historiographical criticism, and oral history interviews, bolstered by comprehensive literature assessments. The project has generated academic output, including published papers, conference presentations, and draft articles, enhancing continuing intellectual discourse. Team members have engaged in local and international dissemination campaigns, enhancing professional networks and promoting multidisciplinary collaborations. RESTORY also promoted lectures by distinguished experts in history, sociology, anthropology, and heritage studies, focusing on topics of memory, identity, and cultural preservation in post-conflict contexts. These knowledge-transfer workshops and expert-led talks have improved methodological proficiency, especially in oral history, microhistory, and archive research. Additionally, the project organized a specific training event on network analysis in historical research, providing researchers and cultural sector professionals with quantitative tools for examining past interactions. Together, these activities strengthen multidisciplinary collaboration, promote novel research methodologies, and enhance the academic and professional advancement of project participants. True to its creed, according to which historical discourse needs to extract its narrative energy from within the very community that created it, RESTORY’s researchers included local protagonists as often as possible in investigations. Especially the oral history interviews echoed wonderfully in local communities, emulating a sense of belonging, a reconnection with a lived past, and a participatory presence that inspired and energized interviewers and interviewees alike. Moreover, the locally circumscribed past was connected with larger national and international memory repositories (archives and libraries), retrieving previously unacknowledged stories, thus painting a more vivid picture of the dynamics between centres and peripheries, depicting intuitive solutions adopted in the past to still existing societal issues: sustainable management of resources, or local schooling.
