Many people see technology as a threat to authenticity. I see an opportunity.
An opportunity for our traditions to survive. To be understood and passed forward instead of remaining forgotten between yellowed pages and dusty shelves.
I believe that digitalization and artificial intelligence can become not the enemies, but the guardians of our cultural heritage. And I am not speaking about a distant future - this is something we urgently need today.
How many priceless recipes, local ethnographic studies, and descriptions of customs are gathering dust in community cultural centers or locked inside old notebooks? How many stories are told more and more quietly, until they eventually disappear?
In their analog form, these fragments of knowledge remain frozen — difficult to find and almost impossible to understand as a whole.
Digitalization offers a way forward. It does not simply preserve traditions — it allows them to continue living.
When we gather this scattered knowledge and turn it into a living, active database, it becomes accessible. Understandable. Usable.
With the help of AI, we can begin to discover connections between forgotten recipes, trace how a ritual has evolved over time, or even reconstruct missing pieces of our cultural memory.
Imagine a future where this entire wealth of knowledge is only a click away.
Every chronicle about ritual breads. Every variation of a local celebration. Every recipe passed from grandmother to granddaughter — collected, analyzed, and ready to inspire a new generation.
Young people will be able to connect with their cultural heritage in the way they are most familiar with — digitally, quickly, and interactively. And we will know that our traditions are not merely surviving, but continuing to speak in the language of our time.
Of course, AI will not “save” our heritage on its own. That responsibility remains ours - the people who decide how technology will be used.
Will we turn it into a guardian of the past, or into something that rewrites it?
I believe in the first path. In a thoughtful partnership between innovation and roots.
Not as a compromise, but as an opportunity to give new meaning to our cultural identity.
To keep it alive.
And to carry it into the future.
Written by Gergana Kabaivanova