From the Millennium to Lenin: Official Commemorative Events and Practices in Transcarpathia during the

From the Millennium to Lenin: Official Commemorative Events and Practices in Transcarpathia during the "Short Century"

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Pavlo Leno

Uzhhorod National University

5.2.2025, 18:30

Conference Room of the Center for Urban History

We are pleased to invite you to a lecture by Pavlo Leno, which will start a new season of the public program "Let’s Have a City."

The territory of Zakarpattia region (Transcarpathia) developed in the cultural orbit of several Central European states, but for a long time it was considered an exotic periphery known by different names. Starting in the second half of the twentieth century, this part of the Carpathians began to attract researchers of national identities. In the words of historian Ivan Lysiak Rudnytsky, it was "...a justification for fascinating research ... and contained many universal values," representing the whole of Europe in miniature. The researchers were particularly interested in the ways in which the multicultural population of the Hungarian kingdom of the dualistic Habsburg Empire was reformatted into a single political nation, as well as the development and competition of ethno-national and state projects that developed in the region during the so-called "short twentieth century."

The lecture will focus on the reconfiguration of official commemorative policies through the prism of practices and regional peculiarities, using the example of Transcarpathia. The main focus of the presentation will be on the war memorials of the Soviet era (1944-1991) and the rituals and practices around them. The lecturer will present them in the broader context of the homogenization processes, first of the Hungarian and later of the Czechoslovak authorities, that shaped and adjusted its symbolic/memorial space. This broader context allows us to see structural similarities and recurring practices, such as the habitual toponymic renaming and erection of monuments in squares or streets of settlements and beyond. At the same time, this broader approach will also help to reveal differences. In addition to similar renaming policies and the emergence of numerous memorials, the Soviet government was characterized by active interference in the sphere of family and calendar rituals, which was not observed in the Hungarian and Czechoslovak periods of the region's political development.

Finally, the lecture will offer not only a reconstruction of the official history of such monuments, but also show "grassroots reflections" on their appearance in the public spaces of the cities and villages of the region, and the gradual transformations of both the memorials themselves and public attitudes toward them during the last decades of Soviet rule and already in the period of independence. In this context, a separate issue that is worth considering is the problem of the contemporary "decolonization and decommunization" of symbolic space, as well as the public response to this process.

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Pavlo Leno

Uzhhorod National University

PhD in History, Associate Professor of the Department of Archeology, Ethnology and Cultural Studies at Uzhhorod National University. He is a member of the working group of the Ukrainian Association of Oral History. At the Center, he is on a scholarship program supported by the Institute of Human Sciences and is researching the development of the cult of the Great Patriotic War in Transcarpathia during the reign of Leonid Brezhnev.

Credits:

Cover Image: monument in Serednje village in Zakarpattia oblast (now dismantled) / State Archives of Transcarpathian Oblast, fond 3933, op. 1, p. 592

Gallery: Olya Klumyk