Paper short abstract:

Through examining St John the Baptist Church in L'viv –functioning history museum and consecrated church at once – the talk shows how an odd, paradoxical setting inspires spontaneous engagement with the very history of the USSR it does not represent, producing a peculiar memory culture.

Paper long abstract:

The John the Baptist Church in L'viv could serve as a metaphor of memory wars in post-socialist spaces. Being the first Roman Catholic church in the city it has strong symbolic role despite its original architecture being virtually lost by now. After being used as a morgue during the Soviet period it now simultaneously functions as the Museum of the Oldest Monuments since 1993 and as a consecrated church since 2009.

The complexity of the site arises from the fact that a historically relevant building becomes a stage for a history other than its own. The exhibition uses a formal language and style resembling Soviet curation, yet it tells the story of L'viv from its Neolithic settlers to the Medieval Era, only to be disrupted by the innermost corner featuring an altar where the prayer of the faithful is muted by the voice of the museum guide. A rite in its ahistorical, seemingly eternal presence is thus being actively negated a harmless, outdated memory show, while both aspects entirely ignore the recent past of Soviet Ukraine.

Analysing a building that poses on the heritage map of the city only to disrupt the visitors' expectations I hope to show how the absence of recognition enables an implicit remembrance not through presence but absence: the hostile, yet interacting functions force visitors to stop and reflect on the potential causes of such a paradoxical space, thereby memory becomes a spontaneous performance of jokes and questions rather than a passive consumption of something staged.