EMYA2025 Annual Conference and Awards Ceremony
The EMYA2025 Annual Conference and Awards Ceremony took place in Białystok, Poland from 21 to 25 May 2025.
Organised by the European Museum Forum and hosted by the Sybir Memorial Museum in Białystok, the winner of the Council of Europe Museum Prize in 2024, the EMYA2025 Annual Conference and Awards Ceremony brought together members of the EMYA community including former candidates, partners and friends, in addition to the EMYA2025 nominee museums.
We thank everyone who joined us celebrating this special moment and congratulate the winners of this year in different award categories as well as the nominees who took part in the EMYA2025!
About the Host
The Sybir Memorial Museum opened in 2021 in Białystok, near the border with Belarus. It stands on the original site of the Poleski Railway Station. Bialystok was assigned to the Soviet sphere in the German-Soviet division of Poland and became part of the Belarusian Soviet Republic after the Soviet annexation.
The museum tells the story of successive deportations of people from Poland to Siberia, northern Russia, and Kazakhstan during the Soviet occupation and the division of Poland in the period 1940-41, and deportations during the communist period of the Soviet Union after the Second World War until 1952. The museum expertly balances a museum for the history that Poles associate with Siberia and a memorial for the last survivors of deportations and their relatives. It addresses an important moment in European history and, more broadly, deportation and transgenerational memories of struggle. The museum aims to play a community-building role in gathering the memories of individual experiences and testimonies from witnesses to history. Its ability to convey history through workshops, events, media, publications, and new formats is commendable and successfully reaches broad audiences.
The museum is effective in addressing the universality of experiences such as deportation, enslavement, exile, struggle for survival, care for the family in times of danger, and mutual support of people in difficult conditions. The museum recognises the importance of difficult memories within today’s Polish and European communities and a commitment to democratic ideals and respect for human rights.
The museum was awarded the prestigious Council of Europe Museum Prize at the EMYA 2024 edition.
