Cultural icons arise from symbolic practices and refer to widely circulating literary products or particularly visible artefacts of “high art” and popular culture. Iconicity possesses strong emotive potential as it relates to particular places, figures, actors, and the narratives consolidated within them. This issue traces the emergence, perpetuation, transposition, and mobility of cultural icons within the East-Central European artistic – and especially literary – field in an interdisciplinary frame of references and in an extended time period, spanning a mythical folkloric past to modernity and the most contemporary era.