Authors

Petia Mankova¹;  ¹ UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Norway

Discussion

The paper seeks to understand how the current war in Ukraine has affected the practices of memorialsation at the Russian-Norwegian border. The landscape along the border is seen as a palimpsest, built of different layers of memories and memory sites: archaeological remnants from the Stone Age, traces after the indigenous Sami, border demarcations and installations, 19th-century Finnish and Norwegian settlement, military battlegrounds from the Second World War; hydropower plants from the Cold War. In 1992, a nature reserve (zapovednik) was established in the restricted border area on the Russian side. It is the only institution that has protected the historic environment and preserved the memory of past human lives in this wild environment for many years. The presentation will look at the changes in the commemorative practices initiated by the reserve in the last years and discuss the intersection between memorialisation, ecological conservation and official historical narratives.