Two famous battles of Alexander Nevsky were the Battle of the Neva in 1240 and the Battle on the Ice in 1242. They have a cult status in Russian history. But the battlefields had long been forgotten, and the place of Battle on the Ice is still unknown. There is a certain paradox: the memory of battles for a long time was in books, ecclesiastical texts. It was verbal, it had its visualization in the works of art, etc. But the battlefields themselves as a memory object are less important than the virtual veneration. This paradox is extremely interesting for understanding of the mechanism of formation of national historical memory. It turns out that the physical existence of the memory of the object plays a minor role, even for such seemingly obvious and important facilities like Battle of the Neva or the Battle of the Ice. The narratives, books, paintings, movies play a far greater role than the "memory space". It may not be monuments can be elsewhere. The story of the battle that has existed in the intellectual and cultural space of modern times, in the 19th and 21th centuries is much more rea for the nation than a genuine medieval history of the battle. The conversion of these events in the national memory of the characters, "the mobilization of the Middle Ages" for ideological needs is a wholly modern phenomenon.