culture

Jo Jong Won, lecturer of the History Faculty of Kim Il Sung University, was awarded a special diploma at the closing ceremony of the intangible cultural heritage exhibition-2025 held for the first time in the DPRK last year.

It is because he made a distinguished contribution to unearthing and ascertaining the cultural heritage elements created by the Korean people for a long time.

Kim Pong Nam, deputy director of the National Authority for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, said, “Jo Jong Won found out many cultural heritage elements of our country and registered them as national ICH elements though he was busy with education. He devoted his sincere efforts to this work.”

While working as a lecturer of Kim Il Sung University after graduating from the postgraduate course of the same university, he attended the short course on ICH protection held under the sponsorship of the National Authority for the Protection of Cultural Heritage one day in 2013.

The course dealt with the situation in which the protection of cultural diversity was faced with a serious threat due to the rapid deterioration, disappearance and destruction of ICH in different countries during the negative social change at the end of the last century and the rising generations’ lack of understanding of such heritage and their conservation.

It also seriously discussed the significance of the conservation of ICH and the measures to revitalize it.

That day he was lost in deep thought.

It was important for him to present the doctoral thesis prepared with much effort in the past, but he decided to unearth even one more ICH element to contribute to enriching the spiritual and cultural assets created by the Korean people.

So he chose the registering of ICH as a research task and began the work with registering “sleighing”, a folk game enjoyed by Korean children from olden times, as an ICH element.

Busy as he was giving lectures, he avidly read national classics and other necessary books and talked a lot with relevant experts to discover such heritage elements one by one.

Sometimes he visited old natives in the remote mountain villages of Ryanggang Province in the northern part of the country to discover and ascertain the data on the culture related to Phungsan, the national dog of the DPRK.

Without wasting time, he devoted a lot of efforts and enthusiasm to collecting data needed for registering heritage elements by clarifying their origins and defining their concepts. 

In those days he registered “Korean wedding custom”, “Korean greeting etiquette”, “custom of moving into new houses”, “horse riding” and “top spinning” as ICH elements.

When the custom of the 24 seasonal divisions of the year by the lunar calendar was registered as such a heritage element, he proved historically and scientifically all the topics of the academic circles such as the resourcefulness and wisdom of the Korean people, who already invented the unique 24 seasonal divisions with a profound knowledge of the movements of heavenly bodies in ancient times, and the history of the custom, thereby drawing the admiration of historians and examiners.

Thus he has discovered and registered eight ICH elements over the past nine years.

In August last year he was acclaimed by the participants in the international symposium held on the theme of “Independence, equality and regional development” at Kim Il Sung University as he, as chairman of the panel of economics and humanities, proved that to preserve and develop national cultural traditions is an important requirement for the countries and nations aspiring to an independent and peaceful new society.

His research to unearth ICH elements is going on.