region (Russia) for her assistance in the empirical study mentioned in the article. Every city is a place, a place we live in or a place we love, a place we are willing to leave or a place we hate. That means, that any place has multiple functions, visions, representations, emotional ties with people. A model of palimpsest is a one I use hereby to consider that inevitable multiplicity.

No abstract

Cultural geography is a rather young and not completely institutionalized geographical science in the Russian realm. There are no cultural geographical atlases present in the state of the art, Russian classifications of thematic atlases, though one of the options includes “the atlases of culture”. A series of S.Ya. Suschiy’s atlases of the history of Russian culture and regional historical and cultural atlases may serve as some examples of atlases using the materials of cultural geography. These atlases are rarely original in terms of the means of cartographic visualizations. They are often merely historical or even hardly include any maps being only formally named as atlases while in reality looking like regional encyclopedias. The phonomena of cultural geography have received a certain development among thematic maps of complex atlases. Though the maps of cultural artifacts prevail in this case there are the traditions emerging of mapping cultural heritage and also of cultural geographical regionalization. There are such examples present in the volume “History. Culture” of the National atlas of Russia and also in some thematic products of neighboring disciplines like ethnic, ethnographic and ethnogeographic atlases. However, one can hardly witness any specific for cultural geography mapping means or approaches even in these latter cases. Mental maps could be regarded as potentially prospective trend for creating atlases specifically within cultural geography. In this regard, there is a need to overcome the existing dichotomy of mental maps like graphic means of picturing the human perceptions of their environments and traditional cartographic products focusing on mental representations. The prospect is likely to be focused on the complex cartographic decisions linking spatial representations and certain cultural landscapes.

Theoretical approaches to renaming as present within critical toponymy and cultural geography are described in the article. The critical approach presumes neglecting the traditional etymological studies and considers toponymy as a reflection and a projection of certain social processes. A geographical approach to the social meanings of renamed places is suggested to develop this paradigm by means of explaining the multiplicity of a place. The place itself as a notion, a center of human meanings and a starting point of the unite world view is used as a domain for the suggested approach. The critical geographical paradigm is combined with the representational approaches typical for new cultural and humanistic geography in order to create a stereoscopical vision of a place through the multiplicity of its meanings, images, lived social practices and semiotic signs. Developing the notion of geoconceptualization of a place within its renaming a palimpsestic approach in toponymic studies is stated. Geoconcept are regarded not only as linked to certain place images and meanings, but also as a part of the process of the endless process of the new world views’ formation. The toponymical palimpsest reveals the multiplicity of renamed place as semiotic resignification thus turning a geoconcept into an intertext.