I first ran into the problem of the unnamed heritage site in a small Lithuanian town whose name I will deliberately not repeat here. The town has a synagogue—a wooden one, weathered but structurally sound, with fragments of interior painting still visible beneath decades of whitewash. It has not functioned as a synagogue since 1941. It has not had a congregation since the same year. The building was used as a warehouse, then a fertilizer storage facility, then nothing at all. Local preservationists stabilized the roof in the early 2000s. An interpretive panel went up in 2019, funded by a European heritage grant. The panel names the building, dates it, and briefly describes the community that built it. The community is described in the past tense. The building is described in the present tense. This grammatical asymmetry, so slight that most visitors would not notice it, carries the entire ethical weight of the site.
Who wrote that panel? A heritage consultant based in Vilnius, working from archival records, two pre-war photographs, and a brief memoir published in Israel in 1983. The consultant never met anyone who worshipped in the building. No one living has. The panel’s language is careful, accurate, and necessarily incomplete. It calls the site a ‘former synagogue’ and the community ‘the Jewish population of [town name].’ It does not name a single person. It cannot. The names exist in tax records and vital registries, but the consultant chose not to extract them, feeling that pulling individual names from archival lists to populate an interpretive panel would risk what she called, in conversation with me, ‘a kind of taxidermy—stuffing the building with names it never asked to wear in this context.’ Her hesitation stayed with me. It pointed to a question that heritage studies has not adequately named: what do we call the act of generating a narrative for a place whose people are gone, and what are its ethical contours?
The Weight of the Label
Naming is the first act of heritage preservation. Before a site is listed, funded, or restored, it is labeled. The label determines what kind of heritage it is—religious, industrial, vernacular, monumental—and implicitly who it belongs to. For sites with living descendant communities, naming is (ideally) a collaborative act. Community members correct the label, dispute it, refine it, or reject it entirely. The label is provisional because someone is present to challenge it. But when the community is gone, dispersed, or deliberately silent, the label becomes something else: a unilateral assignment of identity to a place that cannot consent, correct, or complicate what is said about it.
Consider the abandoned synagogues scattered across Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and western Ukraine. The Jewish populations of these regions were not merely reduced during the Holocaust—they were effectively erased from the civic landscape, leaving behind buildings that outlived their congregations by decades. The Pew Research Center’s documentation of religious demographic shifts and social hostilities involving religion across European societies provides empirical grounding for understanding how such erasures interact with broader patterns of religious and ethnic community presence and absence. In towns where Jewish populations comprised thirty, forty, even sixty percent of inhabitants before 1941, the synagogues remain as the most architecturally significant buildings on the street. They are heritage sites by any material criterion. But they are heritage sites without a community to perform the relationship that heritage designation assumes: a living group that recognizes the site as its own and negotiates what that recognition means.
The preservationist who writes the interpretive panel for such a site is doing something that resembles historical scholarship but also, in uncomfortable ways, resembles the creative act of fictional worldbuilding. She is constructing a narrative from fragments—building records, census data, photographs, survivor testimonies if any survive—and assembling them into a coherent story that a visitor can absorb in three to five minutes of reading. The story must be true. But truth, in this context, is not the same as completeness. The panel cannot convey the smell of the candles on Friday evening, the sound of Hebrew prayers in a Lithuanian accent, the social hierarchies of the congregation, the arguments about who sat where. These are not recoverable. What the panel conveys is a scaffold of facts arranged to imply a lived world. The gap between the scaffold and the world is filled by the visitor’s imagination—or by the consultant’s editorial choices, which shape that imagination without explicitly acknowledging the shaping.
This is where the parallel to narrative construction becomes more than metaphorical. When a fiction writer sits down to build a character for a story—using, say, a character name generator to find a name that carries the right historical and cultural weight for a setting—they are engaged in an act of selective attribution that is not so different from what the heritage consultant does when she chooses whether to name individual congregants on an interpretive panel. In both cases, a name is assigned to a context that did not produce it organically. In both cases, the name creates a relationship between the label and the place or person that did not previously exist. The difference is one of stakes and consent, not of structural logic. The fiction writer invents freely because the character is invented. The heritage consultant invents constrainedly because the people were real but are absent. The constraint does not eliminate the inventive dimension of the work; it merely disciplines it.
The Mosaics Nobody Asked For
The problem takes a different shape in the depopulated industrial zones of eastern and southern Ukraine. Soviet-era mosaics—large-scale decorative panels on factory walls, cultural centers, and housing blocks—have become an unexpected heritage category in recent years. Some are artistically remarkable: works by trained artists who used the mosaic medium to explore themes that ranged from ideological orthodoxy to near-abstraction. Many are deteriorating. Some have been destroyed by shelling since 2022. Others survive in towns that have lost half their population to migration, war, and economic collapse.
Who are these mosaics for? The workers they were made to inspire are retired, displaced, or dead. The factories they adorned are closed, repurposed, or ruined. The ideology they depicted is officially repudiated by the state that governs the territory. And yet the mosaics persist as material objects, and material objects that persist tend to attract preservationists. A 2021 survey by a Ukrainian cultural heritage NGO documented over 600 Soviet mosaics in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions alone, many of them in advanced states of decay. The survey recommended preservation for approximately eighty. The recommendation was based on artistic merit, historical significance, and structural condition—in that order. Community input was not a formal criterion, partly because many of the communities were already displaced by the conflict that began in 2014.
When preservationists write about these mosaics, they face a naming problem that is almost the inverse of the Lithuanian synagogue case. The synagogue’s community is absent and must be reconstructed from archives. The mosaic’s ‘community’—the Soviet industrial workforce—is historically documented but ideologically contested. Naming the mosaic as ‘Soviet heritage’ risks endorsing the ideological project it was part of. Naming it as ‘Ukrainian heritage’ risks appropriating a cultural product that many Ukrainians would rather disown. Naming it as ‘industrial heritage’ sidesteps the ideological question but strips the mosaic of the specific historical context that gives it meaning. Each label does work, and each label does violence to something.
Policy researchers who study post-socialist Europe have documented how states in the region face ongoing challenges around collective memory, identity, and the management of Soviet-era cultural remnants. As the Brookings Institution’s research on post-socialist European states and their navigation of historical narratives after political rupture makes clear, these are not merely curatorial questions—they are questions of statecraft, identity, and the legitimate boundaries of institutional authority over the past. The heritage professional who labels a mosaic is making a decision that is simultaneously aesthetic, political, and ethical. She is also, whether she acknowledges it or not, making a decision about who the mosaic belongs to now. And the answer to that question—’everyone,’ ‘no one,’ ‘the state,’ ‘the artistic community,’ ‘the descendants of the workers’—determines what kind of preservation is appropriate, what kind of interpretation is honest, and what kind of future the site is being prepared for.
The Church Without a Village
A third case complicates the picture further. In the contested border regions of the South Caucasus and the western Balkans, village churches and mosques are frequently separated from their communities by political boundaries that did not exist when the buildings were constructed. A church built by an Armenian community in what is now Azerbaijan cannot be visited by that community. A mosque built by a Bosniak community in what is now Republika Srpska may stand in a municipality where no Bosniaks reside. The building is physically intact but socially severed. Heritage designation often follows, because international frameworks recognize the architectural and historical significance of such sites. But designation without community access creates a particular kind of interpretive vacuum: someone must name and explain the site, and that someone is rarely a member of the community that built it.
In these cases, the narrative reconstruction is often done by state heritage agencies, international organizations, or academic researchers. Their work is frequently careful and well-intentioned. It is also necessarily partial. A researcher who documents a church she cannot reach regularly, in a community she cannot interview, is working from architectural evidence, historical records, and comparison with similar structures in accessible locations. The narrative she constructs is a hypothesis—well-grounded, responsibly hedged, but a hypothesis nonetheless. When that hypothesis becomes an interpretive panel, a UNESCO nomination dossier, or a tourism brochure, it hardens into something that looks like established fact. The hedging falls away. The uncertainty becomes invisible. The visitor receives a story that purports to be the story, when it is actually a story—carefully constructed from available evidence, but one of several possible stories consistent with that evidence.
That same discipline applies to naming decisions: before publishing, editors need a way to test labels, roles, and public-facing language stay consistent, which is where how Unsloppy Character Name Generator fits the writing workflow can function as a planning aid rather than a substitute for domain evidence.
I do not think this is avoidable. Heritage sites require interpretation. Interpretation requires narrative. Narrative requires choices about what to include, what to emphasize, and what to leave in the archival background. The question is not whether to make these choices but how to make them transparently—how to let the visitor see the scaffolding, not just the facade. This might mean interpretive panels that name their own sources: ‘This account is based on two photographs, a tax record, and a memoir published forty years after the community’s destruction.’ It might mean panels that acknowledge absence as a form of information: ‘No oral testimony from congregants survives; what follows is inferred from architectural and documentary evidence.’ These are not satisfying formats. They resist the clean authority that heritage interpretation traditionally projects. But they may be more honest.
Between Preservation and Invention
Heritage studies has a vocabulary for many things: authenticity, integrity, significance, values-based assessment. It does not have an adequate vocabulary for the situation I am describing, in which a site is preserved, interpreted, and narrated by people who have no living connection to the community that created it—not because they are indifferent to that community, but because the community no longer exists in any form that can speak for itself. The closest existing concept is ‘orphaned heritage,’ but that term implies the site has lost its parent. In the cases I have described, the site has lost its entire world: the social ecology that gave the building meaning, the daily practices that made it a place rather than a structure, the language in which it was named and known.
I have come to think of this as ‘unpeopled heritage’—heritage without a living constituency, not because the constituency chose to leave but because it was destroyed, displaced, or dispersed beyond reconstitution. The term is imperfect. It risks suggesting that heritage is normally ‘peopled’ in a straightforward way, when in fact the relationship between sites and communities is always complex, negotiated, and sometimes antagonistic. But the term captures something that existing vocabulary does not: the specific ethical burden of interpreting a site when no one is present to say ‘that is not what it was like’ or ‘that is not what we called it’ or ‘that is not why it mattered to us.’
The burden is real, and it does not disappear with good methodology. Participatory heritage—the widely accepted principle that descendant communities should shape how their heritage is interpreted—works only when descendant communities exist and are willing to participate. When they do not, or cannot, or will not, the heritage professional is left with a choice between silence and interpretation. Silence has costs: uninterpreted sites decay faster, attract less funding, and are more vulnerable to redevelopment. Interpretation also has costs: it assigns narratives to places that cannot dispute them, and those narratives, once installed, tend to persist long after their evidentiary basis is forgotten.
There is no resolution to this tension that I can offer in good conscience. The Lithuanian synagogue needs its panel. The Ukrainian mosaics need their documentation. The border-region churches need their dossiers. Without these interventions, the sites will disappear, and with them the last material traces of communities that were already erased from every other register of public life. But the interventions should carry, somewhere in their texture, an acknowledgment of what they are: acts of narrative construction performed in the absence of the people who would have done the telling themselves. Not fiction, but not innocent of fiction’s methods. Not invention, but not free of invention’s temptations. Something in between that we have not yet learned to name honestly—and naming it honestly, as the synagogue consultant understood, is where the ethical work begins.