#my lviv

[marinawoznjuksworld]

[folklorespring]

Do French people know what Ukrainians are doing with croissants..... Do they know.... That we put literally anything inside it....... My friend's go-to order is croissant with herring, pesto and mozzarella. There's a croissant-cheesburger...

[lethendralis-paints]

A mini-watercolour (9x9 cm) I painted today with a view of my hometown, Lviv. That was fun, although some colour choices were questionable :D

[alcestas-sloboda]

lviv, ukraine.

[panimoonchild]

Explore and fall in love with the cities of your country before it's too late; before Russia wants to wipe them off the map

On the 26th day of the music challenge, which is dedicated to love. I want to share some of the once charming cities of Ukraine, some of which have remained so. I regret that I was not able to visit some of them when they were radiating with life. Let's begin!

Bakhmut one was the city of wine and roses but now Russia wipe it off to complete ruins. I can't talk about it. I'm sure you all see hell with Bakhmut in the news. No more words can describe that experience.

Song: Austin Mckenzie - Crazy Beautiful

Melitopol was known as the city of the delicious cherries with a rich aroma and taste before the Russians came. Residents never give up even in the occupation. I hope I will see you in the all beauty of yours.

Song: Halsey - Honey

Izium is famous for its huge strawberries and pine forests rich in mushrooms. After Russia, it was destroyed and tortured. It was here that the most torture chambers and a forest with mass graves were exposed. It has been liberated for a year now. And the town is slowly but surely recovering. It is a long process after the horrors Ukrainians have experienced.

Song: BTS - Love Maze

My hometown. My Donetsk. My Ukrainian Donetsk. I will wait for the blue and yellow flag to fly over you again. And those depressing and black rags will fade from your memory.

In memory, you left only like that. Strong, courageous, welcoming, and progressive. Those characteristics Russia almost sucked it out of you. Unfortunately, when we ran from Donetsk, we didn't take photo albums with us. Only photos from Donetsk and Mariupol I have because some of them were sent by my relatives. Digital copy some of them. That photo of me as a child. I was happy and peaceful to live in Ukrainian Donetsk. Me and my family never forget that we are Ukrainians. Never doubted that. If we don't run away from Donetsk, I'm sure we will end up like my classmate Bohdan Maksymenko in Russian captivity. Because we never hide who we are. My mom almost fought with the parents of her pupils who didn't understand what they voted for in the "referendum". My sister has connections and shares a mindset with Donetsk ProUkrainian artists. Who organized the rally for Ukraine. I could not go to school after that "vote". If I leave there, I am almost sure will end up killing myself. Because I can't live when my identity is not safe. And hide and lie that I'm Ukrainian. No way. It's hurt as hell to imagine. I am always thankful to my mom that she decided and leave everything, even our flat just to keep me and my sister safe and happy. She is strong as steel. Love you, mom.

Song: Антитіла - Завжди моя

Lines that hit close to home:

"You will always be mine,

Like a melody

Of my mother's songs

You will always be mine,

Like my native land.

And I love you from the moon and back!"

That video of the rally for Ukraine on 17th April 2014 in Donetsk makes me heavily tear up. Again.

Mariupol district always leaves beautiful memories from my childhood. This field of sunflowers on the road to selo (village) Berdianske where I had rested with my family until 2013 only now have all the colors of it in my memory come to life. After the occupation and destruction of Mariupol. I have two photos from Berdianske. All the memories remain in my head. I only wish I could visit you liberated and rebuilt and I'll freely run through the field of sunflowers with bare feet. Only wish...

Song: Motanka - Bosymy Nizhkamy

Lyrics that describe the humanized version of Mariupol before Russia are:

"Somewhere in the forest, there was a girl in a wreath

She lured the morning with her charming beauty

She fell in love

And the night of the day is living its last life

With her bare feet, with her bare feet"

Lviv. My second hometown. My shelter. My breath of fresh air and freedom. My cultural outlet.

There I finished high school and university. It's crazy to understand but I have lived here almost 10 years now. When in Donetsk I had lived 14 years of my life. Time is a scary thing.

Song: BTS - Trivia: Love

[the-jam-to-the-unicorn]

Volena met the Macrons (4)

[anastasiamaru]

Pidhirtsi Castle

[justthreefrogs]

Hello,

Y'all might've seen me mention that my grandparents apartment complex was the victim of the July 6th attack by Muscovites on the city of Lviv. Thankfully they are alive, but ten of their neighbors lost their lives and their apartment has to be rebuilt. Meanwhile, they will have to tend to their fragile health, rent a new apartment, and replace destroyed property.

My father has started a GoFundMe to support them and their neighbors, and I have also put together a Google Doc with donation links to support their community and Ukraine at large. I thought I might as well put the links here just in case. Every bit helps and is very appreciated. The war has mostly left western consciousness, but it is affecting Ukrainian lives massively every day. Слава Україні 🇺🇦

[holmesoldfellow]

The Sherlock Holmes boutique Hotel and Missis Hudson Café in Lviv, Ukraine

[marinawoznjuksworld]

[estetyka-chichky]

[old-memoria]

What countries would u like to visit?❤️

Oh god the whole planet lmao. My dream is to go to Antarctica, you know those trips from Argentina to the Antarctic coast, I’d reeeeeally love to do that but it costs like hell and the flight to Argentina alone is like 15 hours

I’d love to visit the US, Canada, Brazil (or any South American country), Ireland and South Korea. Never been there. I’ve traveled quite a lot through Europe, so wish to visit Austria my beloved, Portugal, the UK and Italy. Yeah and also Israel and Singapore, been there a few years ago and I was really impressed

Yet with this travel ban the only travel opportunity that seems realistic is Siberia. They are offering a lot of free trips to Siberia these days you know

[ilookattextile]

I got a job at a Ukrainian museum.

On the first day someone asks me if I have any Ukrainian heritage. I say I had ancestors from Odesa, but they were Jewish, so they weren’t considered Ukrainian, and they wouldn’t have considered themselves Ukrainian. My job is every day I go through boxes of Ukrainian textiles and I write a physical description, take measurements, take photographs, and upload everything into the database. I look up “Jewish” in the database and there is no result. 

Some objects have no context at all, some come with handwritten notes or related documents. I look at thick hand-spun, hand-woven linen heavy with embroidery. Embroidery they say can take a year or more. I think of someone dressed for a wedding in their best clothes they made with their own hands. Some shirts were donated with photographs of the original owners dressed in them, for a dance at the Ukrainian Labour Temple, in 1935. I handle the pieces carefully, looking at how they fit the men in the photos, and how they look almost a hundred years later packed in acid-free tissue. One of the men died a few years later, in the war. He was younger than I am now. The military archive has more photographs of him with his mother, his father, his fiancé. I take care in writing the catalogue entry, breathing in the history, getting tearful. 

I imagine people dressed in their best shirts at Easter, going around town in their best shirts burning the houses of Jews, in their best shirts, killing Jews. A shirt with dense embroidery all over the sleeves and chest has a note that says it is from Husiatyn. I look it up and find that it was largely a Jewish town, and Ukrainians lived in the outskirts. There is a fortress synagogue from the Renaissance period, now abandoned. 

When my partner Aaron visits I take him to an event at the museum where a man shows his collection of over fifty musical instruments from Ukraine, and he plays each one. Children are seated on the floor at the front. We’re standing in a corner, the room full of Ukrainians, very aware that we look like Jews, but not sure if anyone recognizes what that looks like anymore. Aaron gets emotional over a song played on the bandura. 

A note with a dress says it came from the Buchach region. I find a story of Jewish life in Buchach in the early twentieth century, preparing to flee as the Nazis take over. I cry over this.

I’m cataloguing a set of commemorative ribbons that were placed on the grave of a Ukrainian Nationalist leader, Yevhen Konovalets, after he was assassinated. The ribbons were collected and stored by another Nationalist, Andriy Melnyk, who took over leadership after Konovalets’ death. The ribbons are painted or embroidered with messages honouring the dead politician. I start to recognize the word for “leader”, the Cyrillic letters which make up the name of the colonel, the letters “OYH” which stand for Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN in English). The OUN played a big part in the Lviv pogroms in 1941, I learn. The Wikipedia article has a black and white image of a woman in her underwear, running in terror from a man and a young boy carrying a stick of wood. The woman’s face is dark, her nose may be bleeding. Her underwear is torn, her breast exposed. I’m measuring, photographing, recording the stains and loose threads in the banners that honour men who would have done this to me. 

Every day I can’t stop looking at my phone, looking up the news from Gaza, tapping through Instagram stories that show what the news won’t. Half my family won’t talk to the other half, after I share an article by a scholar of Holocaust and genocide studies, who says Israel is committing a genocide. My dad makes a comment that compares Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto. This gets him in trouble. My aunt says I must have learned this antisemitism at university, but there is no excuse for my dad. 

This morning I see images from Israeli attacks in the West Bank, where they are not at war. There are naked bodies on the dusty ground. I’m not sure if they are alive. This is what I think of when I see the image from the Lviv pogrom. If what it means for Jews to be safe from oppression is to become the oppressor, I don’t want safety. I don’t want to speak about Jews as if we are one People, because I have so little in common with those in green uniforms and tanks. I am called a self-hating Jew but I think I am a self-reflecting Jew.

I don’t know how to articulate how it feels to be handling objects which remind me of Jewish traumas I inherited only from history classes and books. Textiles hold evidence of the bodies that made them and used them. I measure the waist of a skirt and notice that it is the same as my waist size. I think of clothing and textiles that were looted from Jewish homes during pogroms. I think of clothing and textiles that were looted from Palestinian homes during the ongoing Nakba. Clothes hold the shape of the body that once dressed in them. Sometimes there are tears, mends, stains. I am rummaging through personal belongings in my nitrile gloves. 

I am hands-on learning about the violence caused by Ukrainian Nationalism while more than nine thousand Palestinians have been killed by the State of Israel in three weeks, not to mention all those who have been killed in the last seventy-five years of occupation, in the name of the Jewish Nation, the Jewish People — me? If we (and I am hesitant to say “we”) learned anything from the centuries of being killed, it was how to kill. This should not have been the lesson learned. Zionism wants us to feel constantly like the victims, like we need to defend ourself, like violence is necessary, inevitable. I need community that believes in freedom for all, not just our own People. I need the half of my family who believes in this necessary “self-defence” to remember our history, and not just the one that ends happily ever after with the creation of the State of Israel. Genocide should not be this controversial. We should not be okay with this. 

Tomorrow I will go to work and keep cataloguing banners that honour the leader of an organization which led pogroms. I will keep checking the news, crying into my phone, coordinating with organizers about our next actions, grappling with how we can be a tiny part in ending this genocide that the world won’t acknowledge, out of guilt over the ones it ignored long ago. 

[panimoonchild]

Russian culture is bloody terror

Being a Ukrainian means waking up in the middle of the night with the feeling that there will be shelling.

And you see that the Russians have raised their strategic aircraft and you react: "You have to go to sleep while you still have a few more hours of sleep before the attack".

Last night I could barely keep my eyes open, but I had to sit in the corridor because my region was targeted today.

Today we have [those who stay alive after attacks] the luxury of going to bed again because it is Sunday. But starting tomorrow, Ukrainians will have to live and function in the aftermath of another Russian night attack.

Please keep spreading our voices and donate to our army and combat medics (savelife.in.ua, prytulafoundation.org, Serhii Sternenko, hospitallers.life, ptahy.vidchui.org and u24.gov.ua).

[horohordina]

[the-jam-to-the-unicorn]

🥲🥲🥲❤️❤️❤️