Hi!
It was meant to be a so-called special edition of Sunday Letter where I wanted to share two places I visited yesterday (some hints about what to see in the future)... It will be partially like that, but the point is, after all the attacks we endure now and will in future, I am not sure whether these places stay safe.
OMG. I am writing it and cannot believe my eyes.
Me: - Really?
War: - Yeah! I can do everything.
So, the focus of this Sunday Letter will shift towards: I want to save it for history.
Of course, I believe in our air defence, our Armed Forces and our strength. But war has a hurricane power to destroy everything.
In this letter, you will mainly see the photos I took during my trip (if not - I will specify).
We will start from the village of Bohdanivka, approximately 50 km from Kyiv. It is a small village with bad roads, tiny houses, and a vast heritage.
The picture above shows a photo of the house where one of the famous Ukrainian artists, Kateryna Bilokur, lived.
'If we had an artist of this skill level, we would make the whole world talk about her,' Pablo Picasso said of Bilokur.
She was born in 1900 in a typical Ukrainian village family. Kateryna was not allowed to go to school, so she learned to write and read by herself. Her parents prohibited her from drawing. At that time, women were not supposed to paint or do something creative, as they had to be good mothers and wives and care about the household.
Kateryna learned how to make brushes and paints. She used everything she could find: for brushes - hairs from a cat's tail and for paints - all the dyes that nature offers.
In her letters (yes, she wrote letters as I do), she mentioned she had one art teacher - nature.
Kateryna Bilokur, Happiness, 1951
Kateryna believed flowers embodied the most elegant beauty of existence and never picked them as she considered it murder.
I mentioned that parents didn't support her efforts. They blamed their daughter for not being married and humiliated her. Such scandals usually ended with a ban on drawing and destroying her works.
In the late autumn of 1934, driven to despair, Kateryna Bilokur ran to the river to drown herself. She went into the icy water up to her chest and stood there. Her mother came, and Kateryna stood in the river until she permitted her daughter to paint as much as she wanted.
However, she caught a bad cold. Her legs, which got cold that day, have been bothering her all her life.
One day, in the spring of 1940, Kateryna heard the song "Was I not a viburnum in the meadow" on the radio, sung by Ukrainian singer Oksana Petrusenko. It impressed Kateryna so much that she wrote a letter to the singer. In addition to the letter, the artist put a piece of canvas with her drawing of a viburnum in the envelope.
And a miracle happened: the envelope signed 'Kyiv, Academic Theatre, Oksana Petrusenko' reached the addressee. The drawing impressed the singer, and she showed it to her friends... After a while, the Centre for Folk Art in the region received an order to find Kateryna Bilokur and looked at her paintings.
In 1940, the Poltava House of Folk Art opened the first solo exhibition of 11 paintings by Kateryna Bilokur.
But the war started...
I took this and the previous photos in Kateryna Bilokur's house.
Kateryna Bilokur has always dreamed of having the right conditions for drawing. She wanted nothing and no one to distract her from her art, to have a place to give her personal and creative freedom. She dreamed of escaping from the village, but she never made it.
In 1954, her eight drawings were sent to the exhibition in Paris. Two of them were lost. One of the paintings, 'King Spike,' had five spikelets. I will give you some context to understand why it was crucial for the Soviets.
In 1932, the Soviet authorities adopted the so-called 'Law of Five Spikelets'. All property in collective farms was considered to be state property. The law provided severe punishment for even five ears of grain being cut - 10 years imprisonment in concentration camps or execution. This caused Holodomor, which took away millions of Ukrainian lives.
Probably, those five spikelets were unwanted reminders for the Soviets. The painting was never found.
Kateryna Bilokur, King Spike (a variant of the lost painting; she tried to draw it from memory five times).
The last three years of Kateryna's life were hard. She lived poorly in a village house where water was freezing during winters. She died on June 10, 1961, in Yahotyn, in the hospital that since 1983 was opened as a gallery. Now, in this gallery, you can see 73 paintings of Kateryna Bilokur.
I visited this art gallery yesterday. And I will tell you briefly about it.
Yahotyn is approximately 100 km from Kyiv. A small town in the middle of nowhere - I saw it like that. But a famous art gallery with many works by talented Ukrainian artists is a gem.
The building of the art gallery was a part of the Palace built in the 18th century by Kyrylo Rozumovskyi, the last Hetman (political title assigned to military commanders) of the left bank of Ukraine.
A painting that shows the Palace.
Today, only one part of the palace remains, which is made of stone. The rest was made of wood. The bolsheviks burned it down during the revolution in 1917 (they destroyed a lot of cultural heritage at this time as they were fighting with the rich and noble).
Actually, the remaining part was a building where servants lived. You can see it below.
Now it is a marvellous gallery surrounded by a park. I can only imagine how beautiful this park is in late spring or summer (or especially autumn).
Someday, I will tell you the fascinating story about the Rozumovskyi family (please remind me if I forget).
Meanwhile, I will show you some pictures from the gallery (it keeps the works of different Ukrainian artists). It's very disheartening to see history repeating itself as the russians attempt to destroy what they couldn't before.
Our brave soldiers are doing their best to keep our history alive, and I am doing everything I can to show you what we were left of this history.
Please let me know if you find such special editions of Sunday Letter useful. If so, I can make them regularly, let's say once a month.
As usual, a gentle bow from me and my words,
Lady with a pen (and a camera)
P.S. Ukraine suffered a large attack on its critical infrastructure this week. On March 22, the thermal power plant and all transformer substations in Kharkiv were destroyed. Around 40% of households have been reconnected to the power grid. At the same time, 60% of homes had their heating systems repaired, and nearly all of them have running water now. This is just a tiny example of what russia is doing to Ukraine.