HERS EU Project

❓What if cultural heritage is not only preserved in museums, archives, or history books?
❓What if it lives in family recipes, songs, traditions, memories, and stories shared around a table, during celebrations, or passed quietly from one generation to the next?

Across Europe, ♀️ women play a vital role in carrying and preserving cultural heritage every day. Through their experiences, knowledge, creativity, and traditions, they keep cultures alive while building bridges between communities and generations.

Through the HERS project, we are creating a space where these stories can be shared, celebrated, and preserved.

✨ Soon, the HERS platform will bring together personal stories, artworks, memories, and cultural heritage shared by women from diverse backgrounds across Europe. Because behind every tradition, there is a story. And behind every story, there is a voice worth hearing.

She folded it. Carried it. Unfolded it in a new home.

This is a Pateh, the traditional needlework of Kerman province in south-eastern Iran. On a wide woollen ground, women work months of dense silk stitches into cypress trees, paisleys, and suns. These patterns have been passed from mother to daughter for centuries, prepared at home, often as part of a daughter’s trousseau.

The cypress at the centre carries particular meaning. In Persian culture it stands for endurance and continuity, a tree that bends with the wind and stays rooted.

For the women of the HERS community, the pateh holds exactly that. A piece of home that survives the journey. A language of belonging that needs no translation.

To every woman in our cohort who has carried her heritage with her, in colour, in thread, in pattern, we see it, and we honour it.

Turkish coffee and the salted cup

A small cup of coffee can carry a powerful meaning.

In Turkish coffee tradition, especially during the kız isteme ceremony, the bride-to-be prepares coffee for the groom and his family. According to a well-known custom, the groom’s cup may be prepared with salt instead of sugar.

If he drinks it with patience and respect, the gesture becomes a symbolic sign of love, commitment, and readiness to face life’s challenges together.

For many women, preparing and serving coffee is not only an act of hospitality. It is also a way to take part in a cultural ritual, express meaning through gesture, and keep a tradition alive in everyday and family life.

Within HERS, this practice reminds us that intangible cultural heritage can live in one cup, one ritual, and one shared moment.

One cup. One gesture. One tradition.

🧵 Some stories are not written in books. They are stitched slowly, by hand, across generations.

In many cultures and communities, embroidery is more than decoration or tradition. It becomes a quiet way of preserving memory, identity, and belonging. Through patterns, colours, and techniques passed from mothers to daughters, everyday textile work carries pieces of home, family history, and cultural heritage.

As part of the HERS project campaign “Heritage in Everyday Life: Women as Cultural Carriers”, we continue exploring the invisible ways women preserve and transmit culture through everyday practices, objects, and stories. Because heritage does not only survive in museums. Sometimes, it survives in fabric, thread, and the hands that keep creating. 🌍

✨ Culture does not live only in museums or history books.
It lives in everyday moments, in traditions passed from one generation to the next, and in the women who keep them alive through stories, rituals, language, crafts, and memory.

Through our HERS campaign, “Heritage in Everyday Life: Women as Cultural Carriers”, we invite you to discover small but meaningful examples of intangible cultural heritage from Greece, Italy, and Cyprus.

Across the next weeks, we will share stories, objects, and everyday practices that reflect identity, belonging, and cultural continuity across borders and generations.

Because sometimes, the most powerful forms of heritage are the ones carried quietly, every single day. 🌍