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Masha, 15 years old, Donetsk“In the living room we have a huge window, and it is round, very beautiful, and you can almost see all of Donetsk from it. A huge living room and a huge window, and you look at the whole city in the evening. It’s wonderful.” “A bridge to Scherbakov park, I love this bridge so much. You are passing from the city (it reminds me of a bridge to Trukhaniv island here in Kyiv) into a different space, there this park is also like an island. And you always have locks on the bridge. I remember when I was little my friends and I kept on competing - one counted the locks on a right side of the bridge, and the other one - on the left side.” “When I happen to be in Donetsk again, I will first of all meet up with people, of course, I will drop by my home, leave some things, will lie on my beautiful bed, will play guitar and piano, and then will go to school, walk through Scherbakov park, all of this with friends, with teachers…” |
Yekaterina, 28 years old, Stakhanov
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Sergey Ilyich, 59 years old, Luhansk “I was a head of a Youth Residential Complex (housing project) in Luhansk. We built this house by ourselves, and of course, it it an apartment house, but it is still mine. It means a lot to me”
“And here we have a “Hard-worker with a torch”. That is the way people call him “a man with a torch”. So this man is standing like this, he has his arms like this, his legs like this. And he stands in the middle of the road. If you had been to Luhansk, you would have known it. If you came to visit me, I would bring you home, showed you Sovetskaya street, showed Shevchenko monument to you..” |
Nazar, 10 years old, MakiivkaWhat kind of city is Makiivka? “In comparison to Kyiv it is small.” Do you miss something that was left in Makiivka? “Yes, my favourite books. I had a book “Cipollino”. Also I miss TV.” If you could have bring something from Makiivka, what would you bring? “My bicycle. I started to bike when I was around 5. I used to ride a four-wheeled bicycle, but then two wheels broke down. It was a small bicycle, later I had another one. I used to bike around Makiivka, to school, to other streets.” |
Irina, 56 years old, Donetsk“The hardest thing was the fact that you can not return home, simply can not return home. (...)”
“The only thing that I miss are children’s books. My grandson tells me: “Grandma, do you remember this book you have, I would like to read it.” And I say: ”You have to go to the library for that, honey”. “Not far from my home there were three houses and everybody called them “three piglets”. |
Aleksandr, 26 years old, Alchevsk “All of my friends stayed in my childhood. There were rows of trees where we used to catch lizards. Lizards liked to be caught. They lived with me until they’d die”.
“When a friend came to visit me, I showed her Alchevsk and we went to the plant, and it was beautiful, there was a water tower - an industrial romance of sorts.” |
Irina, 49 years old, Horlivka
“I miss my apartment, and a lot of little things in it. Of course, it all does not matter too much, but those things are important to me because of memories. For example, I miss little magnets on my fridge - my husband and me used to bring them from our trips, from Paris, from Baltic countries… It’s just that we will buy another fridge one day, but the magnets, the magnets were left there. I miss my photo albums as well. And my husband misses his books on art, they are very big and also were left there.”
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Artur, 25 years old, Avdiivka
What did you take with you? “A silver coin. My grandma once was in Belarus and bought a coin in a cathedral. I would not say that I am very religious, no, but usually it is somewhere close to me. Saint Nicholas is depicted on it.”
“The quarry. People from Donetsk call it “a blue lake”. Whole Donetsk used to come here to swim. (...) There is quartz sand, it is white, and water is almost blue, like in the Black Sea. It is very transparent, like in Yevpatoria, just not saulty. “ “When we had a breadmaker, we usually bought flour and baked our own bread. And truly, when you have been away from home for a long time, you are craving that home baked bread. It even smells differently.” |
Svetlana, 39 years old, Snizhne “For me my Snizhne remained a town of my childhood”.
“When I just left, I did not want to return, but shock has passed and after a year you start to understand that you want to return there - just to go see your parents, just to go for a walk with the ones who stayed, especially if your relatives stayed there.” “(...) In Snizhne there are many mines, and my childhood memories are of my grandmother scolding us: “Don’t go to a pit.” We could not understand what she meant at that time. And as we found out later it was an abandoned mine, and a mine shaft is called “a pit”. We were always fascinated by the idea of going there, and we just did know that we could simply die.” “When you go...you used to go to Savur-Mohyla… I can’t live without Savur-Mogila. It is a natural mound, and it is very beautiful there. Voronets flowers grow there. Voronets flowers are wild peonies. The flower is flat, it has four-five petals and a yellow center. A blank, empty peony. On a clear day you could see Azov see from the top of the mound. Feather grass grows on top of it, wild feather grass. And at night you get to the mound and you feel anxious - there is steppe all around, a huge black soldier, - and at the same time there is some kind of mystery, magic.” |
Dima, 12 years old, Veselenka village, Luhansk oblast“Here there were also houses, here is a field, here are some hills. And here was a road to summer houses. Once we went biking there. My friends and me were biking and biking for half a day, then we reached a big road and were biking and biking and biking and biking, then we saw a sign “Luhansk”, kept biking and biking and biking and biking, through all these villages, I was on a BMX bike, which belongs to Ilyukha. We were biking through forests, across hills, then turned to the road and kept biking and biking and biking and biking. We were biking for three-four hours, then went down to the village. We were really thirsty and did not have any water. When we got back we immediately went to a standpipe, were drinking and drinking and then went home to sleep”
“Here there was one boy, but I did not hang out with him, eh, actually hanged out but just a bit. He has a nickname “Sausage”, he is so weird, terrible. It’s not like he is ugly, well, he is ugly, but he has odd manners. He looks a little bit like a sausage, he is a bit chubby. His pelvis is saggy, it sags likes this. And there was another one, Daniil, he is 12 -Sausage’s friend, his nickname is “Pie”. Daniil was just fat. Pie follows Sausage, Sausage picks up his computer and they go together to Sausage’s home to play computer games” |
Yulia , 28 years old, Luhansk
“I miss the steppe. I haven’t been in the steppe for a year and it is hard for a person who has lived her whole life in the steppe and used to breath this wormwood air... I miss vastness, a huge land surface which goes up to horizon and apricot trees. Yes, I really miss apricots. We have a lot of them. Luhansk is the city of apricots, they lie on the ground, when they ripen, nobody picks them up, there are so many of them there, and here you can not find them at all.”
“There is a beautiful steppe, if you go towards the South. If you go towards the North, there is Popasna, where we “digged up” mounds in archeological trips. (...) Each time I was crossing the steppe I used to scream: “A mound! Look, a mound!” (...), mounds make you surprised and delighted…” “This is our apricot tree. There were a lot of fruits on it. And they were falling down all the time. We picked them up, dried them up and made jams or juices….” “I lived in Luhansk, on Luhanska street, on a bank of the river Luhan”. |
Aleksey,
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Anna, 34 years old, Luhansk“Somehow we were perceiving in it in a way, as if was not happening with our city…”
“When I moved to Kyiv and realized that, God, you can really live without all, all of what has stayed there and you will be OK, happy, because you have taken the most important with you - your children… Mom has sent me some things, I unwrapped them excitedly, smelled in and they did not smell like anything. As if their were not mine. It upset me even more. I got upset because I have lived without those things and will be OK living without them, I got upset because I could not find those memories.” “This year it was scary to see dreams, because when we came here, I started to recall my old dreams, which I saw before the start of all of it. And I realized why so often I dreamt being in some buildings with lots of things, and I kept rummaging through those things...were they stores, or not I did not know...Once I dreamt a street...not that it was destroyed, but people were leaving it. You know, like in old films - a horse, a carriage, people in the carriage. And I say: “What is that?”. - “War”. This I remember so clearly. And later I understood why I saw all these stores - those were humanitarian aid.” “ A nice city, but a city for which nobody cared”. |
Aleksey,
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Nastya, 16 years old, Horlivka“I miss my teddy bear very much. It is a huge white bear, which I got for my birthday. I even have a photo with him as my profile picture. There is no possible way of bringing him here, because he is too big, he takes a lot of space, and for everybody, except me, it is not the most necessary thing to have.”
“When I came to Kyiv it was unusual for me to see so many mothers with baby carriages in the streets. I remember how surprised I was to see them walk along the streets calmly, not being afraid. Lately there were no mothers with children in Horlivka”. |
Aleksandr, 36 years old, Khartsyzk“I am not particularly attached to any places” Maybe you have a favourite park? “Yes, but these places are not mainly in Khartsyzk, but everywhere in the world. I love Lviv, I liked US a lot. Krakow is very beautiful. There is Zuyivka Landscape Park, it is one of the biggest rock climbing places in Eastern Ukraine”.
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Lyudmila , 48 years old, Donetsk“Just right before the war we planted birch trees here, and were watering them together. We have a great athletic field and a playground here. (...). And just people who live nearby, here there some streets, Druzhby street, then Arbatskaya street, where my house is located, then another street there, and one more… Military factories are somewhere here, the airport is here… And this is my home, and these are birch trees, which people of my district planted in March 2014.”
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