The mosaic is one of the most durable monumental artworks, hence the belief in its permanence. It is resilient to shocks, abrasion, moisture, and frost, protecting, in turn, the walls it covers. These qualities made the mosaic one of interest to the communist authorities, who later considered it suitable for beautifying the exterior walls of various buildings. The article addresses the issue of the symbolic and identity aspect of art in the urban space. The authors discuss the exterior mural mosaics from Suceava, during the communist period, as an expression of the compromise between the ideological commands of the period and the neo-traditionalist and neo-folklorizing direction professed by the artists.

The statues of the city of Czernowitz/Cernăuți/Chernovtsy/Chernivtsi – the capital of the historical province of Bukovina – are a generous subject of study given that the repeated changes of power (Austrian, Romanian, Soviet, and Ukrainian) have brought with them the transformation of the politics of memory and identity. Each of these political regimes that the city went through wanted to prove the legitimacy of owning this territory. Our paper aims to illustrate how the cultural landscape was shaped and remodelled according to the loyalty, creed, sympathies and political or ideological ambitions of successive regimes in the provincial capital of Bukovina. Starting from narrative-historical sources, it examines the sensory commitment of local authorities to the urban environment concerning the changing political realities and how the denial or removal of symbols of the former administrations is equivalent to assuming a new identity. In particular, it presents the intervention of the political factor and its role in shaping the recollection of the city’s main squares. Finally, our findings show that the monuments in the urban landscape have the potential of identity markers, which transform memory – despite its ephemeral and fluid character – into a continuous present.

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Over the centuries, physicians and non-physicians have created their histories of the relationship between health and the environment. In an attempt to discern the mechanisms of disease onset, development, and spread, they tried to link statistics to geography and history and their experience to their contemporary challenges. Although in Europe there is already a tradition of mapping diseases, in the Austrian Empire, only a few maps have been drawn up representing the health system or the state of health of the population. One of them belongs to the doctor Carl Denarowski, who was the health officer of Bukovina in the 1880s. The article deals with the importance of this map, pointing out its peculiarities, its original and innovative character and the echoes that persisted long after its publication. It also presents the major epidemic and endemic diseases that Denarowski identified, mapped and described in the study that accompanied the map.