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Paper short abstract

Donbas as a Site of Memory: The steppe and spoil tips (terykony) form an imagined geography where folklore, industrial past, and war intertwine. Once symbols of labor heroism, today they mark trauma and loss, reshaping collective identity and memory in Ukraine and beyond.

Paper long abstract

Donbas represents one of the most complex and symbolically saturated regions of contemporary Ukraine. It embodies a distinctive imagined geography, where the natural steppe and the industrial landscape intertwine in cultural narratives, oral traditions, and collective memory. At the center of this space stand two key topographical dominants: the steppe, as an archetype of boundlessness, freedom, and borderland, and the spoil tips (terykony), artificial “mountains” of the industrial age that have become new symbols of identity.

In folk songs and legends, the Donbas steppe often appears as a “foreign” and dangerous space, embodying challenges of survival and settlement. In Soviet and post-Soviet discourse, however, it was reimagined as a space of labor heroism and collective achievement. Spoil tips entered folklore and urban culture as signs of toil and suffering, “black pyramids” of memory that were at once romanticized and normalized in everyday life.

Today, under conditions of war, this landscape undergoes resemantization: the steppe once again becomes a frontier and battlefield, while spoil tips mark sites of loss, destruction, and an unresolved dialogue with the industrial past. Donbas emerges as a lieu de mémoire, where local folklore, traumatic experience, and cultural imagery intertwine into a multilayered text.

Studying Donbas as a site of memory allows us to see how landscape shapes collective identity, and how war transforms the semantics of space—from the glorification of labor to the trauma of loss. This opens pathways for reinterpreting folk perceptions of the region within a broader European framework of memory studies.