A meander through Kyiv's Baikove Cemetery expecting little more than an hour among old gravestones, and some solitude. Instead, I found two glorious centuries of Ukrainian history, scattered and disordered like a set of Tarot cards thrown to the wind.
As I strolled and poked about and stood to absorb dates and names, thousands of faces set in pale ceramic watched me from the past with their own placid contemplation, each in a kind of meditative trance, tears of rain and city dust streaking their faces.
Here, there are grand mausoleums to generals, painters, musicians, statesmen, and cosmonauts. The stone blocks of Soviet heroes seem to belong to an ancient past. The fluttering bright flags of the fallen heroes of this latest war suggest a certain life force so recently lived.
Then there are grand tombs marking the great families whose fortunes were built from the same sugar beet fortunes which built the red brick mansions of 19th century Kyiv. Side-by-side are ranks of countless simple graves marked only by two rusting metal pipes fashioned into a cross, or rotting wooden stelae, wormy and damp, falling into one another, slowly returning to earth, names long faded and certainly forgotten.
But I was looking for one grave. Along a spindly track winding between the headstones, and more than a century after the death of Lesya Ukrainka, one of this country’s most revered poets, a group of ten or so elderly people were tending the plinth and bust with broom, and re-setting flowers at the base.
“Without hope, I still hope,” wrote the tubercular Lesya, who endured terrible physical pain. It has become a catch-cry for Ukraine at war.
As I stood there watching their reverential work, more sets of visitors came bearing their respects.
The ceramic portraits fixed to the headstones stared back at me. These were lives shaped by the great 20th century convulsions – Tsarist rule, nationalist awakenings, World War One and civil war, the Holodomor and Stalin’s unremitting campaigns of terror, World War Two and Nazi and Communist forces cutting backward and forward across Ukraine’s fields, scything her people and smashing her cities.
So, Ukraine’s tumult continues as she struggles to defend her borders, and her nascent institutions.
I left the cemetery, shaded by sweetly blossoming Linden trees, and those thousands of silent ceramic witnesses to human folly, to hunger, and suffering. Their eyes say what history never tires of teaching: human liberty survives each generation so long as her people are capable of and willing to defend her.
"Without hope, I still hope." It is not merely the epitaph of a poet. It is the creed of a nation that has refused, generation after generation, to surrender either its memory or its freedom.