Two months before the war, I had a dream: the Mother of God was covering Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv with a red cloth. I understood then that something was coming. I began training; I was preparing for a combat battalion, but they took me as a cook for the kitchen. For the boys, it…
When Lena arrived in Ireland as a forced migrant with two small children, everything still felt temporary. The room they were given did not feel like home, and the future remained impossible to imagine. So when they reached Killarney, she bought the cheapest tent she could find and took her family to sleep in the…
When Natalia’s home in Dmytrivka fell under occupation, the hardest part was not the shock itself, but the collapse of any sense of a safe place. “NOT IN MY COUNTRY, NOT IN MY OWN HOME. I COULDN’T UNDERSTAND WHERE THAT SAFE PLACE WAS. IT WAS SO DIFFICULT TO FIND IT WITHIN MYSELF.” This search for…
Alona worked in film industry for years — casting director, twelve-hour shifts, phone calls at any hour. There was no rhythm, no ground beneath it. When the war began, everything stopped. And in that stillness, she noticed for the first time how a chestnut tree blooms. “IF YOUR INNER FOUNDATION IS STRONG — IT BENDS…
Daria fled Mariupol under occupation. She left not knowing what was ahead – only what was being left behind. War, she says, makes you forget who you are. You become a victim, a fighter, a refugee. Anything but a person. “NATURE DOESN’T ASK WHERE YOU ARE FROM. IT WRAPS AROUND YOU AND SAYS: YOU ARE…
Tanya runs through the Botanical Garden every week. She has done this through every season, including winter. What she notices now is different from before — not the running itself, but what the garden shows her: how a season shifts, how a flower appears and disappears, how life moves in circles whether or not we…
Olya stayed in Kyiv. She didn’t evacuate, and in the first days friends came to stay — some for a night, some for longer — and so they lived together for months: nine people in a two-room apartment, a dog, and a broken lift. She needed to find resources somewhere. She thought about what she…
Vitalia stayed in Kyiv from the first days of the war. She had travelled extensively across Ukraine before – knew every city, every street. And when the shelling began, every piece of news about another strike pulled her into memories: Mariupol, where she had been just before Christmas, Chernihiv, where she had celebrated her birthday,…
Olena is an interior designer from Bila Tserkva, and she stayed in Ukraine. When the war began, a thought came that wouldn’t leave: everything can disappear – belongings, people close to you, your home, everything that mattered. And in that uncertainty she turned to what had always been nearby. When she walks – by…
