Sacred Places in Ukrainian and Polish Narratives about Resettlement from the Flood Zone

A comparative analysis of the concepts of church and cemetery in oral historical narratives and written memoirs about forced resettlement from flood zones in Ukraine and Poland is conducted in the work. Attention is traced to the fact of the destruction or relocation of the church, as well as to the relocation of cemeteries in the Ukrainian and Polish resettlement narrative. The oral history of resettlement conveys the idea of community unity in the semantic field of the church concept. The kermis in their former village has become the date for annual meetings of residents of resettled villages. The semantic field of the cemetery concept conveys the idea of the impossibility of complete resettlement: it is impossible to relocate everything, there will definitely be losses. And it is on these losses that the narrators focus the main attention in their narratives. The interpretation of the forced relocation as a traumatic experience is common in these resettlement narratives. These stories are primarily a transfer of the experience of loss. The home is an important spatial object that all resettlers necessarily talk about. This is primarily their parents’ or their own, destroyed house, and they talk less about the newly built house. The storytellers connect the flooded village image with their birthplace, childhood years; they idealize the lost space, focus on the construction of a new home, in particular on mutual assistance and the struggle to obtain building materials. The collapse of the community, friendly and neighborly relations is another important theme in the interviews. Memories on the transfer of cemeteries in the resettlement narratives are filled with anxiety, bitterness and mysticism. The unnaturalness of the loss of an ancient cemetery site gives rise to ideas conditioned by the ideological prohibition to disturb the dead, and even more so by the fact that not all coffins were reburied. This moment is especially clearly traced in the Ukrainian narrative tradition, where there were even laments for flooded graves that could not be moved. The concept of church is verbalized in the following plots and motifs: information about the destruction or change of purpose of the church; features of religious life in a village without a church; the fate of preserved churches; modern meetings of displaced persons on the days of the temple holiday of former villages; change of purpose of the church in Soviet times; God’s punishment for causing damage to the church. The idea of the most severe loss as a result of resettlement is conveyed in the semantic field of the concept of home. The concept of land conveys the idea of the injustice of resettlement, the concept of cemetery includes the idea of the impossibility of complete resettlement, and the concept of church contains the idea of community unity. Comparative studies conducted in different countries on communities with similar traumatic experiences allow for a deeper, more detailed understanding of what is common and different in the conditioned, verbalized worldview of the past.