Description
This lecture explores the relationship between processes of forced conversion and confessional dissolution during the decades of communist rule and their impact on the religious landscape of the region. As former Soviet and communist states move from post-communism, shaped by the legacy of the collapse of the Soviet Union and Euro-Atlantic integration, into a new era inadequately referred to as “post post-communism”, the memory and post-memory of repression and destruction of religious life has become a powerful political mobilizing force. Increasingly, the heritagization of complex religious sites generated or transformed by communism’s confessional politics, is shaping contemporary religious belonging and identity. Based on the dynamics of Soviet-led attempts at forced conversion of Greek Catholics in Hungary, Ukraine and Romania, this lecture explores the transnational production of sacred space and polycentric networks in the highly palimpsestic religious landscape of the region. Linking Religious Cold War historiography, anthropological theories of antagonistic sharing, and critical heritage studies, this lecture aims to inform our understanding of the contemporary condition in a religiously and politically fractured region.| Period | 16 Jun 2026 |
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| Held at | Irish Association for Russian, Central and East European Studies, Ireland |
| Degree of Recognition | National |