Edible Memories of Kyiv

Sausage-stuffed doughnuts, endless bowls of varenyky chased by medovik and exploring the cuisines of the Caucuses. Our time in Kyiv five years ago is etched on our minds and hanging from our camera...

Kyiv is vast. A city of massive avenues, cavernous underground stations (including Arsenalna, the World’s deepest) and districts set so far apart it feels like crossing continents. Майдан Незалежності (Maidan Nezalezhnosti, literally meaning ‘Independence Square’) is the central point of the city and we found ourselves standing there about to do a hit live on Irish TV when an older woman approached us. She had little to no English and we had not a word of Ukrainian. Her eyes, heavy and sad, looked for ours and, without much language to share, we connected.

The woman gestured us towards a plaque and to a memorial of the Heavenly Hundred, the 100+ protestors killed in the Maidan Revolution just three years prior. She pointed and motioned towards family members or people she knew who lost their lives. Their faces, some smiling, others vacant, a few blurry, a handful as young as 17, immortalised in mementos. Hand-written notes, flowers and little trinkets adorned each one, and scores of little braided yellow and blue bracelets hung from the memorials. The woman’s eyes watered and her voice quivered, a little from sadness but more from bubbling anger. She spoke in Ukrainian mostly, a bit of broken English - “this is about sovereignty and independence,” that much we got - and even though she probably knew we wouldn’t understand a word somehow we sort-of did.

She urged us to take a braided bracelet, about twenty of which were linked around her wrist. They looked like they took pittance to make, and she was clearly selling them, but what caught our eye is they were all different shades of the same colours, blue and yellow representing the Ukrainian flag. Azure and lemon, cobalt and canary, royal and gold. None were uniform in look but all came similarly hand-twisted into a braid, the two colours interlocking. Alike yet individual. “Take your pick,” she motioned as if to say. When we chose she signalled that she didn’t want money, thanked us and started to walk away. Her body language seemed to say “thank you for listening and trying to understand”.

We had just arrived in Kyiv and barely had any local currency on us, having dropped our bags at the hotel direct from the airport then hopped in a taxi to Kyiv’s central point for our correspondent slot on Virgin Media. We put whatever small notes we had in her hand, which felt cold and rough. Maybe this was all a well-rehearsed routine, perhaps 90 seconds later another visitor to the city had a similar accosting. We’d usually be sceptical of being approached in a main square being sold anything… but something was different about this interaction. It rooted us to the spot, in the very centre of Kyiv, the epicentre of a bloody uprising only a few short years ago.

We tied the bracelet to the Nikon camera we’ve been using for years, and it hasn’t left our camera since. A piece of Kyiv and a memory of that trip has been with us on every subsequent trip since. Portugal, France, Croatia, Hong Kong, Sweden, South Korea… and in arm’s reach every time we’re at home, too. Our camera is always with us, and a piece of Kyiv is, too.

In hindsight, that encounter firmed a lot of our impression of Kyiv –– it told us this is a proud city and people, ferociously independent and frustrated at its own shortcomings and struggles yet still wearing its heart on its sleeve. When the war broke out in February 2022, we were visiting Turin. We couldn’t help but notice the bracelet dangling from our camera, reminding us of different times. Memories so recent yet recounted in a World which looked and felt so different.