How to save the past with a sandbag, how to win Ukrainian Easter egg fight and what comes out of a cocoon
episode 3
I didn’t care much for the monuments when I was little. Some made sense to me, but most of those in Kyiv, where I was born and raised, felt imposed. Alien.
They felt useless.
Then russia went full-scale on us.
Just in March 2022 alone, I’ve used the word “evacuation” more than in all my life. It was all we were talking about: with parents, with friends, with people we hardly knew before. Discussing routes - which bridges are blown? which roads are still safe? Everything was changing overnight.
Then, after the initial shock, people started to talk evacuating art.
"It is important for us to preserve our culture. Art is an imprint of culture and our history. Art is also a part of people's diplomacy, it’s how we tell about ourselves abroad to other countries that try to understand us through art. Now the demand for Ukrainian creativity will increase, - Aliona Karavai, co-founder of the Assortment Room gallery told Suspilne.
Assortment Room people were joined by volunteers and together they’ve evacuated 400 Ukrainian works only in the first 2 months of russian full-scale invasion. “Works of 17 artists, art works from Kyiv, Bila Tserkva, Bakhmut”, Anna Potemkina, the curator of the Assortment Room gallery, told Evacuation.City. “Mainly - young artists, small galleries that don’t have funds or spaces where store the art works can be stored”, Karavai explained. For security reasons, she didn’t say where they will be stored.
If war will actively spread to West Ukraine, they planned to evacuate art works abroad.
But what about monuments?
It started with volunteers. Among other initiatives, team of Ukrainian architects launched the RE:Ukraine project .
“In the 2 months of the full-scale invasion, russian forces have damaged (or completely destroyed) 240 cultural heritage sites, ” Sasha Balbek, member of the group, quotes Ministry of Culture in his Instagram post. - “In order to prevent even greater losses, initiative groups from different cities of Ukraine began to strengthen the monuments.”
He added that there was no single system, the structure for each monument had to be modeled from scratch, and the amount of materials was actually determined "by eye".
Balbek said they came up with creating a unified system that would help protect monuments of different types from fire, bullets and debris.
From fire, bullets and debris.
It feels unreal to write this - even 1 year after the beginning of russian full-scale war against us.
But just for a second.
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The stone I sit on feels cold. Kyiv Opera place, where Mykola Lysenko monument is, now covered with grey protective walls, is loved by Kyiv skaters. They come here to jump, to roll, to show off.
I don't look at them now - I am looking to my right. To Zoloti Vorota, to the famous Kyiv Golden Gates. To where ancient Kyiv ruler Yaroslav Mudryi monument is, covered with another block of protective walls.
I hear a noise - the skater behind my back falls from a skate. Gets back on it and is riding again
all focused.
Ready, Steady… break an egg!
Easter for me always meant tonnes of “paska” - a special kind of bread Ukrainians make for Easter, made of a lot of eggs, usually is all fluffy and with raisins and dry fruits. It also usually has white sugary icing, or could also be without it. It can even be with chocolate.
I remember the smell of paskas, baking in the oven, filling the apartment. How you need to wait for them to “raise”. How then later we would go to church so they consecrate it. I wouldn’t say my family was a religious one - as well as many families around me, my friends, my classmates, weren't - but we still would go to church to consecrate the paska, and eggs, and wine in cute baskets, everyone would put them in while waiting for a priest, smiling, talking.
And of course, we can’t talk Ukrainian Easter and don’t talk pysanka.
A Ukrainian Easter egg, decorated using wax and dyes. Every region has its own ways of doing it, its colours and symbols.
It’s so beautiful I feel tiny butterflies in my stomach when I look at it.
When I was a kid growing up in Kyiv, we usually had them more lo-fi style. We would colour them with one colour - by boiling them with onion peel ( to make them bronze ) or by adding special paint.
I still remember that big shelf where we had the box with all the colours - blue, yellow, green, red - all waiting for Easter. Sometimes we had stickers - with vyshyvanka print - Ukrainian traditional embroidery. We would put them straight onto the coloured egg, then in a bowl and then - on the table, for all to see.
So the fight can begin.
When you come to that bowl, you were looking for only one thing - the strongest egg.
And boy I was smart. I was sly. I was the Holmes of Easter eggs.
You have only one go - and so it needs to be perfect.
I would look for cracks. For how sharp or flat is the “nose”. I would weight it in my hand. How long it’s gonna last?
I remember the moment of hitting that first egg. When I’d hear cracking and would close my eyes for a second. Mine or not? And when I open - first left one, then right - and see: no cracks! Mine have no cracks!
and then I’d smile, so wide:
it means I still can play another round.
P.S.
When I saw the first monuments in sandbags, in protective walls, I felt.. a lot.
I felt sad. Angry. Touched. Enraged. The usual mix of emotions during war.
this protection structures itself became a monument to people and how caring they can be - even in the darkest of times. How they can come together. How they can do good.
But it also became a very graphic illustration, a constant reminder to how unsafe we all are.
It felt disturbing.
Then I saw this illustration. Where on the left you can see an Taras Shevchenko monument in Kharkiv, next to it - the same monument, all covered in sandbags - and the next one where you see same Taras Shevchenko monument, that now became a butterfly.
I felt as if something heavy was lifted of. I signed with relieve.
And then laughed to myself.
This is why only art can save us sometimes.
Now, it was no longer a reminder of the war. Now it was just a cocoon - where everything we knew before will be broken into parts and pieces, melted and transformed, so we could emerge as something new. Something magical.
Something worth fighting for.
Thank you, dear readers, for your kind support!
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diakuiu, druzi
see you next week,
Margo
great article and enjoy art myself and happy easter
great.