Raudondvaris Manor receives the European Award for Innovation

2024

Snieguolė Navickienė, Director of Raudondvaris Manor, has brought another international award to Kaunas District Municipality – the ECTN (European Cultural Tourism Network) Award for Raudondvaris Manor for the project “Innovative Raudondvaris: Harmonizing Digital Experiences and Cultural Heritage”.

Six years ago, Raudondvaris Manor was awarded a special prize by the ECTN jury for the adaptation of the Raudondvaris Manor Stud Farm to an arts incubator. This year’s European Cultural Tourism Network award is for Raudondvaris Manor’s innovations and digital solutions in introducing visitors to its historical heritage.

Kaunas District Mayor Valerijus Makūnas was delighted that modern technologies are helping the revitalised Raudondvaris Manor to become even more visible. This is exactly the trend that dominated this year’s ECTN Awards. The innovative initiatives of the 2024 European countries were recognised for promoting digitisation and sustainability in cultural tourism.

The ECTN Awards ceremony took place in the Iconic Gallery of Dublin Castle, the 2024 European Capital of Smart Tourism. The winners were selected from 49 projects submitted by 21 countries.

Cultural tourism projects competed in five categories. These were: accessibility of heritage, intangible heritage (including festivals) promoting sustainable cultural tourism, advances in digitisation and digital transformation, cross-border thematic cultural and heritage tourism products, and the promotion of heritage tourism.

The project “Innovative Raudondvaris: a harmony of digital experiences and cultural heritage” won the award for Raudondvaris Manor in the category “Digitisation progress and digital transformation in smart and sustainable cultural tourism”.

In addition to Lithuania, Italy, Belgium, Ireland, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Moldova, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Poland, Croatia, Greece and Greece were awarded in their own categories.

The ECTN Awards took place at a gala dinner organised to close the international conference “European Cooperation on Smart and Sustainable Cultural Tourism Destinations”. It was an excellent opportunity for the countries’ representatives to share experiences and best practices.

Smart technologies for history

The ECTN award-winning project “Innovative Raudondvaris: harmonizing digital experiences and cultural heritage” marks the current phase of Raudondvaris Manor, where new technologies and innovative solutions are ingeniously used to introduce visitors to history.

The interactive exhibitions and virtual reality tours in the manor house not only give you the opportunity to learn about the history of the manor house, but also to feel the authentic atmosphere of the time with the help of technology.

The Dramatour, which has been very popular, is an artificial intelligence-created audio journey through the history of Raudondvaris Manor and the love story of Sigismund Augustus and Barbora Radvilaitė. The authors of this interactive innovation – two young founders of the start-up WISIT – offer to put on headphones and, while walking from object to object, listen to an exciting audio spectacle that allows you to observe centuries-old events up close and listen to the conversations of their participants.

Visitors to Raudondvaris Manor are already invited to the second “Dramatour”, in which Count Benediktas Jonas Tiškevičius opens up the lesser-known pages of the manor’s past, which are full of intriguing secrets.

Another innovation is the creation of unique video greetings using artificial intelligence during events at Raudondvaris Manor. They have already brought to life a number of historical personalities who have spoken in an AI-generated voice. The starting point was the Kaunas District Cultural Workers Awards, where the famous Raudondvaris-born composer Juozas Naujalis addressed the participants from the screen. His voice was also recreated by the WISIT team using AI.

S. Navickienė, Director of Raudondvaris Manor, has no doubt that innovative technologies not only help to preserve historical heritage, but also to make it more attractive to the public, and that this is the future direction of historical cultural and tourism sites.

Kaunas District Municipality info.