Ukraine's culture war

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KYIV, Ukraine — At the thousand-year-old Cathedral of Saint Sophia here, standing on an easel in front of a golden altar, is a new, freshly painted icon that’s just a foot square.

It depicts a 17th-century Cossack military commander with a long gray beard. He looks humble beneath the immense mosaics that have glinted since the 11th century.

This icon has been painted on planks of wood recovered from the devastated Kyiv suburb of Bucha.  Out of Bucha’s mass graves, in the wake of terrifying Russian atrocities against civilians, something new has come to Saint Sophia: an image of mourning and resolve, of horror and courage, of a culture that will not give up.

Why should anyone care about a painting when cruise missiles are overhead?

Because “this is a war about cultural identity,” said the curator Leonid Maruschak — one of so many writers, musicians and scholars I’ve met here who make no distinction between the survival of Ukraine’s people and land and the survival of its ideas.

With Russia actively trying to erase Ukraine’s national identity, this country’s music, literature, movies and monuments are battlefields. 

But the risks to Ukrainian culture are more than mere collateral damage. For President Putin of Russia, there is no Ukraine as such; he maintains that Ukraine is a Soviet fiction, that the Ukrainian language is a Russian dialect, that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people.”

Every war endangers cultural heritage. Walk through Kyiv or Lviv today, and on every other corner is a statue bundled in flame-retardant blankets. The damage to cultural sites in these past four months alone broadens a horrendous tide of cultural destruction this century, in Syria, Iraq, Armenia and Afghanistan.

[...] “After Maidan, the inability to channel that revolutionary energy into the state got redirected into music,” said the curator and writer Vasyl Cherepanyn, who directs the Visual Culture Research Center, Kyiv’s boldest independent art institution. “War isn’t about death, war is about life.” 

Source - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/15/arts/design/ukraine-war-culture-art-history.html

[CautiousLurker 19,725]

Unfortunately this invasion means that current Russian culture will always be baked into and at least to some extent superimposed onto Ukrainian one - my home country was once occupied by the soviet union and living there and visiting Russia once, I could absolutely see the influence - reflecting on it, it was very prominent - I could see in in architecture and language especially...

As much as invaders often conceptualize themselves as capable of respecting native culture, the goal is always ALWAYS to homogenize and force everyone and everything into a very specific ideal, and the effect of it will always be present, even if the conflict resolves in the native's favor...

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4 hours ago, CautiousLurker said:

Unfortunately this invasion means that current Russian culture will always be baked into and at least to some extent superimposed onto Ukrainian one - my home country was once occupied by the soviet union and living there and visiting Russia once, I could absolutely see the influence - reflecting on it, it was very prominent - I could see in in architecture and language especially...

As much as invaders often conceptualize themselves as capable of respecting native culture, the goal is always ALWAYS to homogenize and force everyone and everything into a very specific ideal, and the effect of it will always be present, even if the conflict resolves in the native's favor...

I am guessing you are from Central Asia? 

[CautiousLurker 19,725]

12 hours ago, FfFfFfFF said:

I am guessing you are from Central Asia? 

No 

[FfFfFfFF 58,361]

2 hours ago, CautiousLurker said:

No 

So the Baltics (or Belarus, but I am inclinted to say the Baltics). Sidenote: What I find sad about Belarus is that the Language is heading to exctinction, is the Language in the worst stage in the former URSS.

In many ways all cultures were changed when the political map changed (European culture has at its core Germanic and Roman conquests). Still, cultures are in many ways valuable and should be preserved from complete assimilation.