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This autumn, EUSTORIANS will travel a total of more than 170,000 km when they make their ways to the annual History Camps for EUSTORY competition prize winners. 45 young Europeans from 16 different countries are invited to discuss questions of history and identity during their week-long seminars.

For the backpacking tour through the Visegrád countries, Shahar will travel more than 3,000 km from her hometown of Tel Aviv to join the other participants in Budapest. From 22 September to 1 October, they will investigate the impact of the media on the Budapest uprising before the Hungarian revolution. Continuing to Prague and finally Gdansk (another 1,400 km on night trains), they will get the chance to speak to professional journalists and media experts about the historic and contemporary roles of the press in the fight for political change. In Gdansk, working at the renowned Europejskie Centrum Solidarności, the participants will finalise their own journalistic pieces and present their findings.

The second History Camp in Tbilisi poses quite a challenge for travel organisation. Branca from Portugal will make a journey of nearly 6,000 km before arriving in Georgia’s capital. Unquestionably, the trip will be worth the making. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the country is trying to agree on a national understanding of its identity, however, secessionist conflicts in some regions impede Georgian unity. Between 3 and 8 October, EUSTORIANS will visit places that have pivotal meaning for the nation’s self-conception and discuss the greater, underlying roots of European identity.

The History Camps offer a forum for broad and open exchange on questions of the European past, present and future that matter to young people from all corners of the continent. They will bring people together who live more than 5,500 km apart, like Ann from Kirov in Russia and Branca from São João de Caparica on the Portuguese west coast. Facilitating encounters between the young awardees of the EUSTORY Network and thereby not only overcoming distances, but also encouraging dialogue and discussions, is one of the main objectives of the History Camps. Explaining her motivation to join the seminar in Tbilisi, Finja from Germany argues, »The contact and the dialogue between the nations are the important foundation to bring together Europe and the world in all our differences and diversity«.

In preparation of the camp, the EUSTORY awardees have started their work on the History Campus, the blog and virtual meeting point for young Europeans. Their results and stories will be published after the seminars in September and October. To find out more about the History Camps, take a look at the 2016 curriculum.