Abstract

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of sacralization of urban space during different stages of the development of European civilization. Urban space in its historical development is regarded as the result of hierotopy. Decommunization of Ukrainian cities also provides vivid examples of desacralization and hierotopy. There is a change of sacral meaning and dynamic reformatting of urban spaces. The city has concentrated religious and administrative institutions that preserve the archetypal memory of their sacred origins, requiring their specialized spaces with the rules of ritual behavior and the distribution of roles established for them. Cities are analyzed in a visual context, are “read” as texts and are treated as artistic images. The cultural turning draws attention also to the mythological aspects of the “character” of cities. In the multi-layered structure of urban space, sacred places are exceptional, the mythological principle of organization and structuring of reality operates against the backdrop of a demythologized urban space. Citizens consciously choose this or that reality and this choice determines their being, the possibility of being in the space of each of the existing realities at any moment. Such mythes are becoming an integral part of the formation of urban identity, a condition for raising the status of a city. In the process of searching for European identity in the discourse of domestic urbanism, an appeal to Masonic narratives is becoming increasingly popular. The urban space of Odessa is a kind of hyper palimpest, which shows the imprint of the diversity of ideological ideas of the European Enlightenment.