Built on up-to-date field material this edited volume suggests an anthropological approach to
the palimpsest-like milieus of Wroclaw Lviv Chernivtsi and Chisinau. In these East-Central
European borderline cities the legacies of Nazism Marxism-Leninism and violent
ethno-nationalism have been revisited in recent decades in search of profound moral reckoning
and in response to the challenges posed by the (post-)transitional period. Present shapes and
contents of these urban settings derive from combinations of fragmented material environments
cultural continuities and political ruptures present-day heritage industries and collective
memories about the contentious past expressive architectural forms and less conspicuous
meaning-making activities of human actors. In other words they evolve from perpetual tensions
between choices of the past and the burden of the past. A novel feature of this book is its
multi-level approach to the analysis of engagements with the lost diversity in historical urban
milieus full of post-war voids and ruptures. In particular the collected studies test the
possibility of combining the theoretical propositions of Memory Studies with broader
conceptualizations of borderlands cosmopolitan sociality urban mythologies and hybridity.
The volume's contributors are Eleonora Narvselius Bo Larsson Natalia Otrishchenko Anastasia
Felcher Juliet D. Golden Hana Cervinkova Pawel Czajkowski Alexandr Voronovici Barbara
Pabjan Nadiia Bureiko Teodor Lucian Moga and Gaelle Fisher.
