Memorial Space of the Great Patriotic War: Semantics of Iconic Representations (Republic of North Ossetia – Alania)

The content of the article is based on the analysis of the author's factual field material in the context of the information-semiotic concept of culture. The iconic diversity of the republican memorial space of the Great Patriotic War as a carrier of coded meanings and socially significant information translates a variety of wartime meanings, including the direct objectification of the unreadable; and it allows us to trace both the experience of memorialization of the military past in the Soviet and post-Soviet historical and cultural contexts, and to identify the specifics of the modern republican memorial space of the Great Patriotic War.
The pictorial portrait-shaped series of memorials, fragments and plots of memorial objects, including semantic analogues of which can be traced by referring to the historical and cultural heritage of the people, allow to "read" the content of war memorials. The interpretation of the transformed state symbols and memorial objects initiated by various subjects of memorialization, the distinctive feature of the meanings represented by female images of memorials, confessional symbols and adaptation of previously taboo subjects in the modern republican memorial space of the Great Patriotic War, due to the changed historical and cultural context and the "cultural code", allow us to talk about the emerging unifying republican memorial culture about the military past and, what is especially significant, an invariable value component of war memorials.