Authors

Maria Engström¹;  ¹ Uppsala University, Sweden

Discussion

This paper explores the recently opened New Chersonesos park–museum complex in Sevastopol, Crimea, commissioned by Vladimir Putin in cooperation with the Russian Ministry of Defense. The site, inaugurated in summer 2024, includes three museums (of Christianity, Crimea and Novorossiya, and Antiquity and Byzantium), landscaped parks, a theater, and a reconstructed Byzantine quarter. I argue that New Chersonesos exemplifies a new mode of memory politics in Russia, in which cultural heritage is not simply preserved but strategically re-engineered and staged as a performative environment. Rather than presenting the past, the complex scripts it, inviting participation, consumption, and political legitimization. Through visual analysis and comparative research on other Russian “memory infrastructures,” I situate New Chersonesos within the broader politics of civilizational narrative-making and the new aesthetics of the “Third Rome.”