Freedom Is Our Religion

We eventually left Istanbul and flew back to Odesa. By then it was late November 2017, and Anya and I had been traveling for months. We lived in Odesa and that had been home base, but never for long. The next month, in December, we headed north to Kyiv for Christmas. We pick up the story of Erik Travels The World there.

We arrived in Kyiv before Christmas with snow on the streets, Christmas lights everywhere, and the city carrying that strange mixture of ordinary life and very recent political history.

Kyiv felt different from Odesa. It was more overtly political, more visibly tied to the independence movement, and much more conscious of the events of the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. Independence Square, Maidan Nezalezhnosti, sits at the center of the city and at the center of much of that history.

Looking at these photographs now is strange. At the time, this was simply another trip to Kyiv. The full-scale Russian invasion was still years away. The city in these photos is the Kyiv I remember before the war: snowy, crowded, argumentative, beautiful, and very much alive.

Travel note: When I originally wrote this in 2020, I used the spelling Kiev and made a little joke about Kyiv becoming fashionable. Ukraine had already begun formally pushing Kyiv internationally through the #KyivNotKiev campaign in 2018; the shift accelerated enormously after 2022. Looking back, that passage has aged rather dramatically. Kyiv is the Ukrainian transliteration, and that is what I use now.

To Kyiv...

Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Independence Square, in the center of Kyiv. When I originally wrote this travel log in 2019, I treated it like any other stop in a city I knew well. It is difficult to look at these photographs quite so casually now.

Independence Square on another trip to Kyiv. We made several. Most of the photographs in this post are from December 2017, when we were there over Christmas. At the time, many Ukrainian Christians following the old Julian church calendar celebrated Christmas on January 7, while December 25 was already widely observed in Lviv and other parts of western Ukraine.

Maidan Nezalezhnosti is the central square of Kyiv and one of the most important public spaces in modern Ukrainian history. It was at the center of the 2013–14 Revolution of Dignity, and nearby Instytutska Street became a memorial to protesters killed during the uprising. Looking at these photographs now, that history feels considerably less abstract than it did when I first wrote this travel log.

I don't know man. Maybe no.

As I remember it, this sculpture represents the legendary founders of Kyiv: the brothers Kyi, Shchek and Khoryv, and their sister Lybid. According to the old chronicles, Kyiv takes its name from Kyi.

Kyiv later became the political and cultural center of Kyivan Rus, the medieval state from which Ukrainians, Russians and Belarusians all trace important parts of their history. That history gets complicated fast, and modern national histories sometimes tell it differently, so I’m not going to pretend I can settle a thousand years of Eastern European history in a travel caption. What matters here is that Kyiv is very old, and its sense of itself is older still.

My last photograph in Kyiv before flying back to the United States, through Berlin, Copenhagen, Reykjavik and Chicago. This is the Red Building of Taras Shevchenko National University. I remember standing there that night very clearly. I didn’t know then that I wouldn’t see Anya again for five years.

You know you're in Eastern Europe when you're man-on-horsing' it.

The sign says “Italian restaurant, home-style cuisine.” I don’t remember this particular meal, but I do remember the food in Ukraine generally being hearty and fairly restrained in seasoning by American standards. The bakeries, though, were wonderful.

Independence Square, or Maidan Nezalezhnosti, in central Kyiv. Most of the time it felt surprisingly relaxed, just people walking, talking, sitting around. But just off the square is the memorial to the Heavenly Hundred, the protesters killed during the Revolution of Dignity in 2014. This contrast is palpable when you're there: an ordinary public square carrying a tremendous amount of recent history.

Looking from the square to the main street in front.

He's got his hands full. Or will soon.

“Kyiv Crypto Conference.” The alphabet is Cyrillic, used by Ukrainian, Russian and a number of other languages. Ukrainian and Russian are both East Slavic languages, while English is West Germanic, despite the enormous amount of French and Latin vocabulary English has accumulated over the centuries. This is one reason the Slavic languages can feel very foreign at first to an English speaker, even though they ultimately belong to the same Indo-European family.

Yeah.

A memorial to Andriy Kuzmenko, better known as Kuzma Skryabin, a hugely popular Ukrainian musician who died in a car crash in 2015. His image was everywhere for a while afterward.

A “TSUM” (ЦУМ), roughly pronounced “tzoom.” The name is an acronym for Central Universal Department Store. Think of one of the old grand downtown department stores, everything under one roof rather than a collection of separate shops. Kyiv’s TSUM opened in 1939 on Khreshchatyk and is still there today.

Man-off-horse, a variation.

Mykhailo Hrushevsky, historian and one of the central political figures in Ukraine’s independence movement during the revolutionary period of 1917–18. His monument was erected in Kyiv in 1998.

The Premier Palace Hotel, opened in 1912 and one of Kyiv’s best-known historic hotels. It sits just off Khreshchatyk in the center of the city.

This is Saint Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery. Very beautiful. You can pay a few hryvnias and take a tour of the grounds. Very much worth it.

Shoveling snow.

You can see the mural in the background. Very beautiful.

Man-on-horse-killing-small-dragon.

Elevated man on horse

Merry Christmas!

Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv. I had forgotten which church this was, but it’s one of the city’s great landmarks, with origins dating back to the 11th century. Beautiful in the snow.

I believe this is the Opera Hotel in Kyiv, a historic early-20th-century building near the National Opera. The hotel itself reopened after reconstruction in 2006.

The Golden Gate of Kyiv, the main entrance through the fortified city in the 11th century. The structure visible today is largely a modern reconstruction built around surviving sections of the original masonry. The statue is Yaroslav the Wise, the Kyivan prince associated with both the gate and Saint Sophia Cathedral.

Pantyusha the cat. He lived at the nearby Pantagruel restaurant and became something of a local celebrity. Sadly, he died when the restaurant caught fire, and the regulars later memorialized him here. Kyiv has monuments to princes, revolutionaries, writers and, apparently, one very popular cat.

Here's the memorial to fallen Ukrainian freedom fighters in Independence Square.

The legendary founders of Kyiv: Kyi, Shchek, Khoryv and their sister Lybid. This monument was installed on Independence Square in 2001. According to the old chronicle tradition, the city takes its name from Kyi.

Get a Slavic girlfriend. Live in Odesa. Visit Kyiv often. Stand in a snowstorm. Be happy.

There was a demonstration going on near the presidential offices while we were in Kyiv, and almost no one else was around except the police. Two officers in riot gear, both carrying automatic weapons, came over and started questioning Anya in Russian. I could follow only bits and pieces, but she was giving it right back to them, and the conversation got fairly animated.

Eventually they shrugged and turned away. I asked her what the hell had just happened. She said they thought I was a Western journalist and didn’t want me filming the protest against President Petro Poroshenko. But we weren’t close enough to create a security issue, and I wasn’t doing anything illegal, so they couldn’t really make me stop.

My response was basically: then let’s get the f*ck out of here.

She, apparently, was less concerned.

I'm not sure the significance of the clock here. Note the cross in front.

Anya in the square.

Perfectly wintrous.

Monument to the independence movement from Russia. This whole issue of Ukrainian independence is just enormously complicated. I will attempt to explain it some other time.

Happy girl.