Mariupol had changed a lot since 2015. Lena1Names have been changed where possible to protect the identities of individuals referred to in this article., a representative of ‘Mariupol Velyka Kulturna Stolytsia,’ the organisation responsible for the city’s branding and promotion, told me why. “People might think that in the east we are not Ukrainian, but we want to show the opposite, that we have many things in common,” she said. Mariupol had become something of a Ukrainian flagship project over the last six years, with its branding campaign the envy of visitors from elsewhere in the country. However, as we chatted in the small office Lena shared with her two colleagues, Mariupol’s development from industrial port city on the Azov Sea to aspiring eastern hub of Ukrainian culture and city of festivals was still very much a work in progress. “Unfortunately there is nowhere to buy a high-quality vyshyvanka (embroidered Ukrainian national shirt) here at the moment, and we are asked about that a lot,” Lena told me.
Yet, even without a readily available supply of hand-stitched national costumes for sale, Mariupol wore its Ukrainian identity on its sleeve. Alina, a member of the city’s branch of the Ukrainian Leadership Academy (UAL), which aims to create “a community of responsible leaders” to “bring about valuable change to the country,” (Ukrainian Leadership Academy, 2022) told me, that when she travelled to other parts of Ukraine, people were often impressed by Mariupol’s branding. “We can go to different places in Ukraine and say to them, ‘Hey, we’re from Mariupol and here is our merch,’” she beamed. The UAL hoodie Alina was wearing, with the slogan “I am Ukraine. I love Freedom” in bold white lettering, made her patriotic feelings abundantly clear. However, it hadn’t always been this way, and she admitted to feeling much more Ukrainian now than she did seven or eight years before. Nevertheless, the extent Mariupol went to demonstrate its Ukrainian identity was not quite to Alina’s taste. “It’s too much for me to have the colours and flags on every corner and the fountain playing the national anthem,” she says as we chat in a café called ‘Why Not.’ “But it’s important for Ukrainians to have those things, on Independence Day for example.”
The truth is it was going to take more than a lick of paint or a singing water feature in the city’s central square to alter deep-rooted perceptions within Ukrainian society about Mariupol and the people who live there. “Oh, not a very attractive place,” a friend of mine from Kyiv writes, with characteristic honesty, when I tell her where I am, “… but I may be mistaken,” she concedes. Walking along Prospekt Mira (Peace Avenue), the city’s main thoroughfare, I’m convinced that she’s right about getting Mariupol wrong. Undoubtedly, my view is swayed by interactions with locals like Yuliia, owner of a sweet shop, who, detecting an accent when I speak in Russian, asks where I’m from. “England,” I reply, removing the facemask I’m wearing as if that will provide the evidence she needs to believe my answer. “Ah, yes, I can see it now,” she says. “Actually you look like that actor, Ewan McGregor. He came here once, on his motorbike.” Yuliia’s flattery secured her a sale and I left the shop with two bags of chocolates that she told me were favourites from her childhood.
Mariupol is certainly no Lviv, the romanticised “spiritual capital” of Ukraine, 1,232 kilometres to the west, with its café culture, army of street musicians and innate sense of Ukrainian identity. However, ‘European’ style coffee shops and bars in the newly restored downtown area had recently become some of the city’s most fashionable places to frequent. Chief among them were the all-Ukrainian chains ‘Lviv Croissants’ and ‘Pyana Vyshnia’ (Drunk Cherry). You could start your morning at the former with a Galician-style croissant, and finish the evening downing glasses of the latter’s patented cherry-flavoured liqueur, which the company claims is “an integral part of old Lviv” (Pyana Vyshnia, 2022). ‘Drunk Cherry’ and ‘Lviv Croissants’ wholeheartedly embrace their version of imagined ‘Ukrainianness,’ going way beyond recently introduced national laws regulating language use in the service industry (Sorokin, 2021) to create a metaphorical ‘corner of Lviv’ out here in the Ukrainian east. And there was certainly no shortage of locals, who enjoyed that experience.
I asked Lena at ‘Mariupol Velyka Kulturna Stolytsia’ if she could imagine something from Mariupol becoming as popular in the west of Ukraine as ‘Drunk Cherry’ is here. After all, an old woman working at the city museum had told me ‘Mariupol cake’ tasted, “like a fairy tale.” “Yes, it’s a bit like Kyiv cake, but made with Greek nuts,” Lena explained, lowering my expectations. “At the moment, there is no business ready to sell something like that on the market, but we are working to find some unique products that can be associated with Mariupol as a city.” When I put the same question to Alina a few days later, she just laughed.
However, there’s a more serious side to the desire some in Mariupol might have to imagine themselves in faraway Lviv, even if it’s just for a moment while enjoying a croissant or glass of cherry liqueur. “People there are so calm,” says Alina. “Some don’t know there is still a conflict here, but sometimes we can still hear it. They don’t have these troubles and stresses. People here drink more than in Lviv because of their problems. There, maybe people drink because it’s (part of) their culture.” Clearly, no amount of cosmetic yellow and blue paint, nor enticingly packaged pieces of stress-free Lviv could fully hide the scars of Mariupol’s recent past, or the fears over its future.
Perhaps it was too soon to describe the city’s streets as an “open museum,” of the kind Kappler (2017:36) found in post-war Sarajevo and Mostar, but potential ‘exhibits’ were everywhere, with the war rarely out of sight, nor out of mind. After Ania, a guide from the Vezha (Вежа) Cultural Centre first pointed out the word ‘refuge’ (убежище) hurriedly scratched onto the outer walls of Soviet-era apartment blocks to me, I couldn’t stop noticing them around the city. They show places where people can shelter from enemy attacks, she explained, and began appearing in Mariupol during the hottest period of fighting in 2014-15. Trails of hand-scrawled arrows snake around the façades of apartment blocks, guiding people to basements with room for them to hide.
“Ah, убежище,’ they’re from the war,” a man said to me with a shrug a couple of days later, after asking what I was photographing on a wall down a side street opposite the park. Their apparent normalcy seemingly belied any “lingering physical and emotional effects that remain even in times of (relative) peace” (Markowitz, 2018:162). However, a mural by Ania’s favourite street artist Gamlet Zinkivskyi, with the caption “You can’t hide from yourself, even in a refuge” (От себя не спрятаться даже в убежище), suggested there may be much more to the story than first meets the eye.
And not all Mariupol’s battle scars were so well hidden. In Hellenic Square, metres from the spot where an eccentric street performer, affectionately known as ‘Grandpa Vova,’ (Дід Вова) entertained the passing traffic with his unique form of expressive dance, all while wearing whatever colourful outfit fit his mood that day, sat a 25-ton concrete memento of the occupation. Tetrapods are familiar sights in coastal cities around the world and are usually used to protect seashores from the impact of incoming waves. However, when Russian-backed separatists attempted to capture Mariupol, many of those defending the coast from the Azov Sea were moved to strategic positions in and around the city, to prevent enemy tanks from passing (Gorbasova, 2019). Too cumbersome to return easily to the seashore, and with a constant eye on the war continuing to rage just 20 kilometres away, Mariupol’s tetrapods remained obstinately on guard in the city’s parks and squares, six years after control had been wrested back from the occupying forces.
Yet the process through which these ‘defenders’ of Mariupol became symbols of the city’s determination to resist, had started much earlier, during a 2013 art project led by Marina Cherepchenko. “Our artist,” as one of my colleagues at Mariupol State Humanitarian University (MDU) refers to her, led an initiative in which painters and designers from all over Ukraine were invited to redecorate the tetrapods in bespoke, and usually patriotic, patterns (Gorbasova, 2019). After contacting Marina through Facebook, she insisted on delivering a set of handmade tetrapods to me in person at MDU, despite feeling under the weather. I told her I planned to hang some of them on my Christmas tree in Estonia, which of course I did. She said it was a great idea, and, disregarding my reassurances that it really wasn’t necessary, worked through the night to make sure they were ready on time.
It’s hard to gauge the true impact of Mariupol’s tetrapods on local discourses or senses of identity. For some, they were just nice objects, experienced almost subconsciously as they go about their daily business of moving through the city. Did the old men sat on benches in the park for instance, utterly absorbed in their games of chess, even notice the one stood between them and the Donetsk Regional Drama Theatre? The staff at the City Art Museum were definitely proud of the large gold-painted replica they had on display in their office and invited me to photograph it. “Just don’t get us in the shot,” they said. Then there was Anastasiia, a student at the university, who, during a class I gave, said the tetrapods meant “so much more to us than just art.”
Maybe there were parallels with so-called ‘Sarajevo roses,’ a network of bullet holes and shelling damage in the streets of the Bosnian capital, left behind from the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s. Decorated by locals to commemorate the city’s time under siege, there are no official rituals or ceremonies to acknowledge the presence or symbolism of ‘Sarajevo roses,’ leaving Kappler (2017:139) pondering whether they “further engrain war into the urban landscape,” or act as a warning against potential new outbreaks of violence. I suspect Mariupol’s tetrapods, and ‘убежище’ wall scrawlings do both. And they are ably assisted in this task by works of street art, none more noticeable than Sasha Korban’s mural of a young girl called ‘Milana’ tightly clutching her teddy bear, as she overlooks Freedom Square.
Visible for miles around, Milana’s is a true story. Her likeness, recreated on the side of a building towering above the trees, provided both a beacon of hope for a better future, and a reminder of what Mariupol had lost during, what Alina called “the times that were.” Just three years old when Russian-backed separatists launched their attack on Mariupol in 2015, Milana was rescued from the wreckage of a shop, which had collapsed ”like a house of cards” under enemy fire (Bulgakova, 2019). She was saved by her mother, who covered the child with her body, losing her own life in the process (Bulgakova, 2019). Not all who walked past her mural knew Milana’s story but those that did would surely agree with Sasha Korban, the former Donbas coal miner, who chose his subject because her “brave heart” was a “symbol of hope,” “stronger than any war” (Korban, 2018).
Milana wouldn’t be the only reminder I’d have in Mariupol, that the victims of war are so often the most innocent. When I find out a play called ‘Alaska’ is being staged as part of a programme aiming to “unite Ukrainian and European directors” and “open a new cultural Mariupol to Ukraine and the world” (‘Devised play Alaska is streaming’, 2021), I contact the organisers, who invite me to the dress rehearsal and the full performance later the same day. I end up going to both. In the small theatre hidden somewhere inside the Hotel Continental, I hear young local actors recount personal stories from their stolen childhoods that forced them to grow “more serious” far too soon. “I can still see everything. The sound of the bombs,” says the youngest, an eight-year old boy from Donetsk, who has never lived in a Ukraine without war. The memory was his own, one he’d wanted to share, says director Evan Kosmidis, who came from Greece to help these children tell their stories on the stage (Alaska, 2021).
I think about the children I myself had taught in Kyiv ten years or so before, many of whom would be around the same age as these young performers are now. “The absence of war is usually called “peace”, but it’s strange,” says a girl, who found out through the TV that the building where her father worked had burned to the ground. “But the tanks are still here. And I’m scared. Scared that the war might happen again. Every morning, every day, every moment.” The tears she’s fighting back are real, and she’s not the only one. “You made me cry twice,” I tell Evan afterwards. Watching the performance back on YouTube later, I guess that makes it three times now.
I left Mariupol on a Friday afternoon. An open book had been placed on the ground in front of the Donetsk Regional Drama Theatre as a literature festival was about to begin. On Freedom Square, workmen were constructing the stage to host Sunday’s annual ‘city day’ concert, marking the seventh year since Mariupol’s liberation from occupying forces. This year the headliners were Ukrainian favourites Boombox. Deputy Mayor Alexander Kochurin said the event showed Mariupol was now, “a city of new opportunities where dreams come true.” (День города Мариуполь, 2021). As I walk past, I look up one last time at Sasha Korban’s mural of Milana hugging her teddy bear. Later, at the train station, I see ‘убежище’ written on a wall and take a selfie. “I hope I’ll be back soon,” I say in a video I record as my train to Kyiv pulls away from Mariupol Station. Now, all I can think of are the words of a Beatles song; “There are places I’ll remember all my life, though some have changed” (Lennon and McCartney, 1965).
References:
Alaska (2021) Performance about the pursuit of happiness by a director from Greece: http://gogolab.org/alaska/en
Bulgakova, Kira. ‘Девочка с мариупольского мурала: новая жизнь после трагедии на «Восточном»’ Mrpl.city (2019) https://mrpl.city/news/view/devochka-s-mariupolskogo-murala-novaya-zhizn-posle-tragedii-na-vostochnom-foto-plusvideo (Accessed July 17, 2022)
Gorbasova, Irina. ‘25 тонн красоты: как украшение Мариуполя стало заграждением от чужой армии’ Radio Svoboda. (2019) February 27
Kappler, Stefanie. “Sarajevo’s ambivalent memoryscape: Spatial stories of peace and conflict.” Memory Studies 10.2 (2017): 130-143.
Korban, Oleksandr. Quoted in Benzine, Vittoria, ‘A Brilliant Mural by Sasha Korban on Resilience of Kids in Conflict Areas’ Street Art United States (2018). October 24. https://streetartunitedstates.com/a-beautiful-mural-by-sasha-korban-on-resilience-of-kids-in-conflict-areas/
Lennon, John and McCartney, Paul. ‘In My Life’ Rubber Soul (1965)
Markowitz, Fran. “Betwixt and between in Beer-Sheva: Consumption and chronotopes in the Negev.” The Palgrave handbook of urban ethnography. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, (2018) 153-168.
Sorokin, Oleksiy. ‘Ukrainian language becomes obligatory for service industry’ Kyiv Post. January 16. (2021) Retrieved from: https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/ukrainian-language-becomes-obligatory-for-service-industry.html