Ukraine, the second largest territory in Europe. Yet, for a larger part of its tragic history it has been a country overshadowed by its powerful neighbours Poland and Russia...
Ukraine, the second largest territory in Europe. Yet, for a larger part of its tragic history it has been a country overshadowed by its powerful neighbours Poland and Russia. Despite the regained independence after the break-up of the Soviet Union, the famous granary of Europe, the land of Cossacks, Serhiy Bubka, Andriy Shevchenko, the "Dynamo Kyiv” and the Chernobyl catastrophe remains a blank page in the eyes of the Western world.
Not until the winter of 2004 did this country emerge out of the shadows, thanks to a Revolution, widely covered by international media. At that moment, the entire world became aware of the existence and weight of a newly reborn nation, which, not so long ago had been just a ghost or “a Russian province”.
Today, Ukraine and its 50 million people are slowly healing their wounds in a post-Soviet society reached by modernism and Western influence. Disfigured in some places, here and there some captivating islands remain as witnesses of a mysterious past.
Atmospheres with the charm of a time gone by conjure up now the Soviet time era, deprived of luster but still intriguing, now the France of the 50ies, that of Doisneau.
People’s faces and the surrounding athmospheres recall that these scenes of daily life, which are difficult to place in time, are taken from streets in Lviv, Odessa, Kyiv, Dniepropetrovsk and the Ukrainian countryside. Life with its positive and negative sides. A sort of social poetry across the lower-class layers of the Ukrainian population.
Both gentle and melancholic, despite painful topics, those images present a counter-stream to the tawdry topics about the East as often conveyed by the West. They make us perceive how despite some difficult social realities, Ukrainians possess a certain human warmth, so strangely magnetic and peaceful.
© Cyril Horiszny
