ABSTRACT
The chapter analyzes the memory culture of the Holodomor in pre-Maidan Ukraine as imposed from above and the artistic embodiments of the Great Famine of 1932–33. The use of Marian iconography in the Holodomor culture of memory exemplifies the attempts to find an individual way of working through the trauma. The image of the Mother of God has never been so actively used as in the first fifteen years of Ukraine’s independence when it entered the symbolism of memorial sites and social rituals to celebrate subsequent anniversaries of the event. However, since the Orange Revolution, there has been a decline in interest in Marian symbolism and its replacement with conventional symbols of universal mourning sourced from both the sphere of the sacred and the nonreligious forms of honoring the memory of the dead.
