City as a Text: Narratives, Toponymy and Language Competences of the Modern Jerusalem

Abstract

This paper analyses the processes when the ancient multilingual and multicultural city becomes a modern capital of the national state on the example of the cultural‑historical phenomenon of Jerusalem during the decline of a centuries‑old era. Now, due to political and cultural circumstances, the image of the city shifts into a different, tourist business sphere, which, in the current era of postmodernism, accumulates symbolic paradigms. Until recently, Jerusalem remained the last Middle Mediterranean municipal commune in the antique‑medieval sense of the word by virtue of its sacral and supranational status. Over the period from the second half of the 20th century and until 2017, there can be distinguished a process of subordination to the national state, as the owner of the territories and rights in the old city, which is demonstrated by changes in the languages used and in the subjects of the narratives displayed. Being a fragment of empires included in the Balkan‑Levantine area, Jerusalem, in the second half of the 20th century, forms a new local text, gradually losing the topics, inherited from the past.