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Sites of Memory VS Cultural Heritage: Urban Violence in Collective Narratives of Odesa Residents in Wartime

by Iuliia Iashchenko

Part I. The Why and The How: Practices of Documenting Urban Violence on Odesa City

The ongoing war in Ukraine has demonstrated with particular clarity that cultural heritage and urban life are not peripheral but central targets in contemporary armed conflict. Since the full-scale invasion in February 2022, systematic attacks have affected not only military infrastructure but also schools, cultural institutions, and historically significant sites. According to international monitoring frameworks, including those of UNESCO, thousands of cultural heritage locations and urban infrastructures have been damaged or destroyed. Among the most emblematic cases in Odesa is the severe damage inflicted on the Transfiguration Cathedral, alongside numerous other historically and socially significant sites.

These developments highlight an urgent need to rethink both the preservation of cultural heritage and the documentation of lived experience during wartime. In cities such as Mariupol and Bakhmut, where large parts of the urban fabric have been effectively erased, the question is no longer limited to physical reconstruction but extends to the preservation of memory, identity, and social continuity. Within this context, the case of Odesa illustrates the importance of documenting not only material destruction but also the experiences of residents who continue to inhabit and navigate spaces under attack.

To counter these challenges, a research project has been initiated contributing to preservation of cultural heritage of Ukraine and legacy of resilience of people in the cities under siege. The project Echoes of Resilience originated as part of an initiative at Sapienza University of Rome aimed at preserving the cultural heritage of Ukraine in the context of ongoing conflict. Developed within this framework, the project was further supported by the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) under the auspices of the LivArch program, which seeks to document and archive experiences of the ongoing war in Ukraine as they unfold. By contributing to the broader effort to record and interpret the ongoing war in Ukraine, Echoes of Resilience emphasizes the importance of safeguarding cultural memory and amplifying personal narratives in times of crisis.

This project addresses that challenge through a participatory, oral history–based methodology to collect sources and preserve them into a live-archive, centering the narratives around survivors’ experience (Caswell). It relies on the systematic collection of interviews, personal testimonies, and privately held documents in order to capture the multifaceted impact of urban violence. By foregrounding residents’ voices, the project shifts the analytical focus from purely visual or architectural assessments of damage to the lived realities of those directly affected (Flinn; Duff and Harris). This approach aligns with broader methodological developments in Oral History and Memory Studies, emphasizing the importance of subjective experience in understanding large-scale historical processes.

At the conceptual level, the project is grounded in the notion of urban violence, understood not merely as physical destruction but as a systematic assault on the spatial, social, and symbolic fabric of the city. Violence in this sense targets everyday environments, homes, streets, markets, and community spaces, thereby disrupting routines, social relations, and the continuity of urban life. It transforms cities into contested spaces where infrastructure, cultural symbols, and civilian environments are simultaneously exposed to destruction.

Preliminary findings from interviews conducted in Odesa reveal a significant discrepancy between institutional definitions of cultural heritage and residents’ own perceptions of meaningful places. While official frameworks prioritize monuments and historically recognized landmarks, respondents consistently identify sites of personal and communal importance, such as cafés, playgrounds, local markets, cemeteries, and residential buildings, as central to their experience of loss. These locations, though absent from formal heritage registers, function as critical sites of memory and identity.

Two key patterns emerge from these testimonies. First, residents frequently describe affected places in anthropomorphic terms: buildings are said not simply to be destroyed, but to be “injured,” reflecting a deeply embodied relationship between individuals and their environment. Second, the most significant losses are not necessarily those that attract international attention, but those that disrupt everyday life. The destruction of ordinary spaces produces a profound sense of disorientation, as it undermines the routines and spatial anchors that structure daily existence.

The project therefore seeks to answer a central research question: how does violence against urban space transform collective experience and memory while the conflict is still ongoing? In addressing this question, it also explores how communities articulate resilience through narrative practices. Storytelling, testimony, and the sharing of personal experiences emerge as key mechanisms through which individuals process loss, assert agency, and preserve cultural identity under conditions of military aggression.

From a practical perspective, this initiative is implemented through the development of a digital platform designed to collect, archive, and disseminate diverse forms of testimony. Participants are invited to contribute interviews, written accounts, video narratives, and other forms of personal documentation. The platform serves both as a research infrastructure and as a publicly accessible archive, enabling broader engagement with the collected materials, promoting the documentation practices as a new archival approach (Rumsey; Brügger; Milligan).

In addition to personal narratives, the platform incorporates systematic documentation of damaged urban sites, including reports on attacks, visual evidence, and preliminary assessments of destruction. This dual structure, combining experiential and material documentation, allows for a more comprehensive understanding of urban violence. It not only records the scale of destruction but also captures its human and social dimensions.

Ultimately, the project contributes to long-term preservation efforts and future historical accountability. By integrating participatory practices into the documentation process, it ensures that the narrative of the war is shaped not solely by external observers or institutional actors, but by the experiences of those directly affected. In doing so, it establishes a foundation for reconstructing both the physical and the mnemonic landscapes of the city in the aftermath of violence.

Part II. Urban Violence and Sites of Memory in Storytelling of Residents

This research suggests that the concept of Urban Violence, applied to understanding storytelling of residents of the damaged cities, should be contextualized within the theoretical framework of Sites of Memory as developed by Pierre Nora, as it provides a necessary lens for interpreting how violence against urban space is inscribed into collective memory. Urban violence leaves a deep wound on societies that have experienced and witnessed the destruction of their cities and the disruption of everyday life, transforming ordinary places into what may be described as “places of strength”, spaces imbued with layers of memory, trauma, and nostalgia. These locations, previously associated with routine and familiarity, acquire an additional mnemonic function and may therefore be understood as emergent lieux de mémoire.

To deepen this perspective, the notion of urban violence can be further elaborated through the work of Alessandro Portelli and his collaborators, whose approach shifts attention from violence as a purely physical or episodic phenomenon to a layered, narrative, and experiential process embedded in everyday urban life. In Portelli’s framework, violence is not limited to moments of destruction but extends into the ways individuals remember, narrate, and reinterpret those events over time. Central to this theory is the idea that urban violence operates simultaneously on material, symbolic, and narrative levels: it reshapes the physical environment, disrupts social relations, and produces fragmented, subjective memories that resist linear historical reconstruction. Portelli emphasizes the value of oral history in capturing these dissonant voices, where inaccuracies, silences, and emotional intensities are not treated as flaws but as meaningful elements revealing how trauma is internalized and transmitted. Thus, urban violence becomes a dialogical process between space and memory, where the city is not only a site of destruction but also an active agent in the construction of meaning, mediating between individual experience and collective remembrance.

Building on this, the argument can be further developed through the lens of trauma theory, particularly the distinction proposed by Dominick LaCapra between “acting out” and “working through.” The transformation of everyday urban sites into memorialized spaces may be interpreted as part of a broader process of “working through,” in which communities attempt to negotiate and articulate collective trauma. Commemorative practices, both formal and informal, embedded in the urban fabric function not only as acts of remembrance but also as mechanisms of coping, enabling a partial re-symbolization of loss. However, this process remains inherently unstable, as such sites may simultaneously perpetuate trauma by continuously reactivating memories of violence, thus oscillating between healing and retraumatization.

At the same time, this spatialization of memory must be situated within broader theories of social and cultural memory. Maurice Halbwachs emphasizes that memory is always socially framed, shaped by collective structures and shared spatial contexts. In this sense, the city itself operates as a mnemonic framework within which individual and collective memories are anchored. The destruction or transformation of urban space disrupts these frameworks, necessitating the reconfiguration of memory through new symbolic associations attached to damaged sites.

Extending this perspective, Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann distinguish between communicative memory, rooted in lived experience and interpersonal transmission, and cultural memory, which is institutionalized, mediated, and preserved over time. The memorialization of everyday urban sites can thus be seen as a transitional process in which communicative memories of violence, carried by witnesses and survivors, gradually crystallize into forms of cultural memory. Ruined buildings, reconstructed neighborhoods, and even preserved traces of destruction become carriers of meaning that extend beyond individual experience, entering the realm of shared cultural narratives.

Importantly, this process also raises critical questions within current academic debates. While Nora conceptualizes lieux de mémoire as arising in response to the loss of milieux de memoir, environments of living memory, the case of urban violence suggests a more dynamic interaction between the two. Rather than simply replacing lost environments, these newly formed sites of memory emerge directly from the violent rupture of lived space, blurring the boundary between everyday life and memorialization. This challenges a rigid separation between memory and history, suggesting instead that in post-violence urban contexts, memory is continuously produced through material, spatial, and social practices.

Therefore, the study of urban violence and its impact on collective memory not only contributes to memory studies but also complicates existing theoretical models by demonstrating how trauma reshapes the very spatial foundations of social life. The city, in this sense, becomes both an archive and an active agent of memory, where the traces of violence are not only preserved but continuously reinterpreted through the practices of those who inhabit it.

Part III. Why Cultural Heritage Is Not Always the Sites of Memory?

The assumption that cultural heritage sites inherently function as sites of memory requires critical reconsideration, particularly in contexts of violent conflict. While institutional frameworks, such as those promoted by UNESCO, tend to emphasize officially recognized monuments, landmarks, and historically codified spaces, empirical evidence from affected communities suggests a more complex reality. In many cases, memory is not primarily anchored in formally designated heritage sites but rather in everyday spaces that structure lived experience.

Oral testimonies collected from residents of war-affected areas illustrate that the most profound sites of memory are often deeply personal and embedded in daily life. One elderly woman, recalling the destruction of her home during shelling, described the impossibility of articulating the trauma of loss—particularly the death of her child. For her, the home was not merely a physical structure but a central locus of memory, identity, and emotional attachment. Its destruction therefore constituted not only material loss but a rupture in personal and familial continuity.

Such narratives reveal that memory is frequently localized in ordinary places: homes, playgrounds, small shops, and neighborhood spaces. These sites, while lacking formal recognition as cultural heritage, acquire profound mnemonic significance through lived experience. Residents repeatedly emphasized that the destruction of these spaces, where they had spent their childhoods, built relationships, and formed identities, was experienced as more devastating than the loss of officially recognized landmarks.

At the same time, these testimonies highlight the emergence of collective responses that reconfigure the relationship between space, memory, and community. In the aftermath of attacks, local populations often mobilize rapidly to provide shelter, food, and material assistance. This collective resilience transforms damaged spaces into sites of shared experience and solidarity. The city itself, despite widespread destruction, becomes a dynamic space of mutual aid and communal reconstruction.

Importantly, the ongoing targeting of civilian infrastructure, including residential areas, educational institutions, and religious sites, demonstrates a systematic disregard for the distinction between military and civilian spaces. Such practices not only violate international norms but also contribute to the erosion of what might otherwise be considered protected cultural and civic environments. In this context, the transformation of the entire urban landscape into a battlefield undermines the very possibility of stable, protected sites of memory.

Religious communities, in particular, play a significant role in sustaining social cohesion under these conditions. Testimonies from clergy and community members emphasize that, even when sacred spaces are attacked, the continuity of the community itself becomes the primary source of resilience. Churches and religious institutions function less as static heritage sites and more as active centers of support, providing material aid and emotional stability.

Additionally, the digital sphere and artistic expression have emerged as important domains of mnemonic production. Residents engage in practices of documentation, sharing, and creative expression, through social media, visual art, poetry, and music, as a means of preserving experiences and asserting agency. These forms of cultural production reflect both the trauma of war and the persistence of communal identity.

In this light, cultural heritage must be understood not as a fixed set of officially designated sites, but as a dynamic and socially constructed phenomenon. Sites of memory emerge through lived experience, emotional attachment, and collective practices, rather than through formal recognition alone. War, in turn, exposes this distinction with particular clarity: while monuments may be destroyed, the most enduring and meaningful sites of memory often reside in the everyday spaces of human life and in the communities that sustain them.

References

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  • Rumsey, A. S. (2016). When we are no more: How digital memory will shape our future. Bloomsbury.

Featured Image: An example of art driven by witnessed urban violence. All rights reserved, copyright by Pavlo Kolomoets.

Iuliia Iashchenko
Iuliia Iashchenko

Nur der Text ist unter der Lizenz Creative Commons Namensnennung 4.0 International nutzbar. Alle anderen Elemente (Abbildungen, importierte Anhänge) sind „Alle Rechte vorbehalten“, sofern nicht anders angegeben.


OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Iuliia Iashchenko (27. März 2026). Sites of Memory VS Cultural Heritage: Urban Violence in Collective Narratives of Odesa Residents in Wartime. DH Lab. Abgerufen am 5. Juni 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/15yfm


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