The panel addresses various, often conflicting narratives, practices and symbolizations that take place among various actors in the process of negotiating cultural heritage in the post-Yugoslav societies. After the breakup of the socialist Yugoslavia, institutionalized practices of heritage making were significantly marked by strong ethnicization on the one hand, and distancing from the Yugoslav and socialist legacy, on the other. However, there is a range of various practices located outside the dominant discourses and practices which challenge, or at least complicate, main assumptions of what cultural heritage is supposed to be in the successor states of the former Yugoslavia. The panel thus aims to provide  insights into the dynamics of negotiating cultural heritage in the former Yugoslavia, placing particular emphasis on vernacular practices and the ways in which they interact with processes of dominant ideologization of heritage, and to highlight the ways in which the dominant canon of national heritage is imprinted onto everyday practice of creating/maintaining heritage. In the moment when the overall crisis calls not only for new economic strategies, but also for rethinking of moral foundations of societies in question, re/negotiation of cultural heritage encompasses often ambiguous processes of commercialization, foklorization and aesthetization of the past experience. The panelist will pay particular attention to these ambiguities and to the way in which lived experience is being turned into cultural heritage.