I am praying for Ukraine. This is a story I wrote some time ago. May it give us perspective. I conducted considerable research before writing it.
Daughters of Chernikiv
My home, Chernihiv, Ukraine, is my favorite place in the world. I am a proud daughter of Ukraine, and if I have anything to do with it, the daughter I am carrying will be too. She is due to be born at Eastertide.
This season we are celebrating now is Christmas, and the fresh snow graces our city landscape, fluffy and pure. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, January 6th We observe the Julian calendar as Orthodox Christians. In reality, the whole city has been filled with carols and our famous song, “The Bell Carol” that people all over the world sing. It was written by Mykola Leontovych in 1916. It was originally called Schendryk, a song for the New Year bringing wealth and prosperity. Now people all over the world sing it.
It is my job and my pleasure to know things like that. My name is Kataryna. I work in Mayor Vladsylav Atroshenko’s office in City Hall. I am the cultural director of this beautiful city, and this time of the year, I am very busy escorting dignitaries to parties and celebrations, and guiding tourists around the city. We are so very proud of Chernikiv.
I try to relate to visitors how our culture experiences Christmas. Because other Christians celebrate December 25, our whole population is festivity-filled for weeks. There are lighted gardens, huge trees with traditional stars and snowflakes, and church services and concerts and ballets in the Tara Shevenchenko Chernikiv Regional Academy of Music and Drama Theater.
I know I’m sounding too much like a passionate connoisseur of the arts. I have to brag about this magnificent structure. It is one of the finest cultural centers in Europe, and we host programs and train artists here. I will be sure to enroll my daughter as soon as she is able to attend. I count it a privilege that I play violin for many performances here. I learned to play from the age of three, studying under some of the best virtuosi in the world. I am grateful for the experience.
One of the great things we do on Christmas Eve is a huge feast and then church services. The feast is twelve traditional dishes, honoring the twelve disciples, from dumplings, to borsch beet soup, to porridge with poppy seeds, honey, and raisins to symbolize wealth. We display sheafs of wheat from the harvest, and enjoy varenyky, which are dumplings with cabbage, potatoes, buckwheat, and prunes.
Afterwards, people gather around the huge city Christmas tree in Khmelnytskyi Garden Square, lift their lighted cell phones, and sing “Carol of the Bells” and other Christmas songs all together. I never tire of seeing our people join to sing and be together. It is as if the heavens open and the heavenly angels sing.
I’d love for you to hear it in Ukraine’s language. I will teach my little one to sing in this choir one day. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBDFMD5kLvc)
Our city is called beautiful (Krasna), and “the hidden gem.” We are in northern Ukraine, 140 km north of Kyiv, our capital. We are the most popular tourist place after the capital and Chernobyl. and even now, I can celebrate all it means to me. This city was first settled in the 7th century and is mentioned in manuscripts as far back as 907. It is known for its magnificent cathedrals, one from 1037, the first university begun in the 18th century, St. Catherine Church with its onion-shaped gold domes. The Piatrytska Church dated from the 12th/13th century, and the Yeleksky monastery from the 11th century. This, for you mystery fans, is supposedly the burial place of our local Dracula.
A short ride to another part of the city, if you are daring, you can find the caves of St. Anthony, and they feature a narrow walkway, bones of monks, and relics of saints. It has been part of this city since its beginnings in 1069. Or if you want to climb up rather than down, visit the bell tower of Holy Trinity Cathedral, built in the 17th century and overlooking the entire region from the Desna River to the abundantly rich wheat fields outside of town.
After harsh winters, we long for spring, and this is the place to be in springtime. Every city has flower gardens filled with tulips, daffodils, and flowering bushes. They and the budding trees are welcome refreshment after the dull greys of winter.
During the forty days of the Great Fasting, this year beginning March 7th, we eat no meat, eggs, or dairy. Our babas and mamas teach us to make Pusanky, wax decorated eggs. From generation to generation. designs unique to our city and to our family are lovingly sketched and colored. Each color has significance. I will teach my daughter this tradition. She will be the fourth generation living in our little wooden house at the foot of St. Catherine’s Cathedral.
On Holy Thursday, we clean the house from basement to attic to prepare for the Easter celebration. Then, Good Friday we break the fast with a fish meal and make the sweet bread called Paska, and it and dyed eggs are blessed by the priest. Then, and only then, can Easter come. Easter is so very special. These are our cultural traditions.
Another practice you will notice is that when you enter a home, you take off your shoes, put on slippers we provide, and you always bring a gift, especially if there are children in the house. If you bring a bouquet, make sure it has eleven blooms, not twelve. Twelve roses or daisies are reserved for memorials and funerals. It is a sign of respect and love. Things like this make Ukraine oh, so special.
And so, I encourage you to visit the marvelous home I’ve known since birth. My family has been here for six generations. We live in the area where there are some two hundred wooden houses, carved with details and shutters like lace. There are also murals on buildings and walls. We are a very artistic place.
I’ll want you will meet my family. We are the Berezas. My mama, Alina and tato Andrey will welcome you. They are city servants, as I am. My husband Petr serves in the UGF, the Ukraine Government Forces. He is a medic. He is somewhere near Kyiv right now. I pray he will be here when our daughter is born at Eastertime.
My younger sister, Anastasiya was born at Eastertime, almost eighteen years ago. Perhaps she and my daughter will have the same birthday, and the same name. My brother, also named Andrey to honor my father and grandfather, is sixteen. He wants to be a soldier for Ukraine, just like Petr.
My baba, father’s mother, also lives with us. She is almost eighty and is deaf and nearly blind. She has had a long, beautiful life, but now, she sits in her chair, bathed in sunlight, and provides a warm lap for our cat. She hums Slavic melodies to herself and tells us she is happy to let others wait on her as if she were a queen. We are happy to comply. We love Baba.
We love Ukraine. For thirty-one years, we have been independent. It’s all I have ever known. We speak Ukrainian and English, and we consider ourselves part of the western world now. We have grown up thinking Ukraine is independent. That’s the way we want it to be.
Our home is on a street with others. We have many neighbors. When we get together, we share stories, holidays, and family celebrations. We are near the Desna Riverbank, with a view of the monastery, high on the hill. It overlooks, perhaps guards, the city as it has for thousands of years.
I tell you all this because all we love, all we hope for, all we treasure, may soon be under attack. First, we have had a terribly cold winter. It has seemed endless. But, another threat looms close to where we live. The hated Russians have amassed troops and tanks and weapons on our border, a mere few miles from Chernihiv, and we hear rumors of war. The evil Russians have attacked before. They covet having Ukraine part of what they call the motherland. It is detestable to us.
We hate the Russians. They want to conquer us because of our love of freedom. We have a much higher standard of living than Russia because we work hard and love our country. There is an abundance of hope when people can govern themselves. It creates a great sense of nationalistic pride. We are fiercely independent. We will never again be part of Russia.
Or so we hope.
If they invade, we will be one of the first cities they will meet on their way to Kyiv.
Although tourists and visitors cannot come in this terrible late winter of 2022 to see its magnificent cathedrals, to shop in Red Square or visit our art galleries, we pray our city will survive the predicted bombardments. The picturesque countryside, the city parks, the theater, may still be here.
Perhaps, God willing, I will welcome you in a better time. That dream must be my source of hope.
As predicted, it is February 22, 2022. I shall never forget this day. Our beautiful city, and indeed our cultural heritage, is under attack.
We are important to Russia. We lie in northeastern Ukraine, and their original plan was to conquer us on their way to Kyiv, our beautiful capital. The Russians call it Kiev in their language.
The Russians reason that if they capture Kyiv in a few short days, the country of Ukraine will capitulate. The people in Chernihiv, some 285,000 of us, made that an impossible task or die trying.
We have barricaded the roads, sometimes with our own vehicles, sometimes with rock walls, sometimes with downed trees. I even saw a piano there. We stockpiled supplies. We made Molotov cocktails, we acquired arms and learned to use them.
And we’ve prayed. Oh, how we’ve prayed, and continue to do so. The sign of the cross leaves bruises on our shoulders.
Their tactic? The Russians have surrounded our city on three sides. The Desna River is on the other. There is only one bridge out of town, and the highway is a ninety-mile straight line to Kyiv. The ruthless Russians began bombing and bombardment. Baba couldn’t hear it but felt each rumble. We haven’t seen the cat in two weeks. And baby Ana Hope jumps and kicks at every concussion. My ribs are sore.
Father has moved our family to the root cellar, a small space where mother keeps her canned foods. He did his best to make it habitable for all six of us. Our house, the only home I have ever known, is now rubble.
Two city workers, friends of mine, escorted me to City Hall. Now I huddle beneath that complex, trying with our staff to run a city as we crouch in our windowless enclave.
Our city has fought back. Our stalwart President noticed. On March 6, 2022, the day before Great Lent began, we achieved a new title: Hero City of Ukraine. This is how we earned that title, in anticipation of the challenges ahead of us, and this is where my story begins.
Our resistance has been so strong, for five long weeks, that, even when they had surrounded us, on March 31, the Russians decided to bypass us and withdraw to other areas. But first, they destroyed the bridge, our only way out of town.
The other cities named Hero Cities by President Volodymyr Zelensky were Hostamel, Kharkov, Kherson, Mariupol, Volnovakha, Bucha, Irpin, Okhtyrka, and Mykalaiv. While the Russians have targeted these cities, only two, have surrendered to Russian forces, although they continue to bombard us all.
The brutality in Bucha and Mariupol has distressed and angered peace-loving people worldwide. But, they have not surrendered. The encouragement of our president, Volodymyr Zalensky, has elevated him to hero status. He brings us all hope and we pray for his safety and God’s grace.
Irpin has been retaken by the UGF, and the Russian troops have been unsuccessful in conquering Okhtyrka and Mykolaiv. Those of our people remaining alive in Mariupol have taken refuge, sheltered under the steel plant. There is underground shelter there, room for many people. Thousands are now neighbors there, with troops and our citizens who carried their essentials and what food they could. They are a surrounded city, a buried civilization under fire, so to speak. The world watches in horror as he is starving our people while continuing to bombard the facility.
My Petr, the love of my life, is a medic. I have not seen him for six weeks. For a while, we could use our phones, but no longer. I pray he is safe. We had made an apartment for us and our soon-to-arrive daughter upstairs in my parents’ home. He built a cradle. I assume it will never hold our child.
The whole roof and upstairs of our house is gone. Everything I have ever known is gone. I grieve I cannot be with my family in that tiny root cellar.
On 31 March, the Ukrainian Army recaptured the highway connecting Kyiv and Chernihiv. The May reported the first quiet night since the war began. On April 1, the Russians left and in that first week in April, our forces recaptured five villages from the Russian army. The world celebrated with us. We were the mouse that roared, the underdog who, against all hope and predictions, showed heroism and courage beyond anyone’s expectations.
It was not without cost. Our city is badly damaged. Most of our homes and many landmarks are destroyed, only, we can hope, to rise again with beauty befitting a champion city. I can give you a firsthand account that many yards contain graves, and other members of our community remain unburied, dead where they landed. When our forces shot down that Russian plane nearby, a whole neighborhood burned to the ground.
Now, the Russians have returned and renewed their attack. They want to assault us and the whole eastern part of our country. How do we overcome this evil? We recount stories of heroism. We think about the helpers. We hope to hear radio stories and speeches from our President Selensky who is valiantly telling the world of our resilience and defiance against the beasts of the East.
It’s stories like helping millions of our countrymen leave temporarily so that our culture can survive, and one day they will rebuild our raged cities. Some have already returned, we hear. They would rather die in the homeland than to live as refugees.
It was never an option for me. I am eight months pregnant with my, no, our, daughter. And I am in the employ of the city. I will do whatever I can to assist our people.
Today is Easter morning. Someone manages to wring the monastery bells. They toll death’s knells, I fear, not the jubilation announcing the greatest miracle of all time. Above the bombardments, we say Khrystos Voskres, “He is risen!” Although we are in tombs of our own, of others’ making, and we have not seen the sun for weeks, we know, somehow, that the resurrection story gives us hope that we will be freed from the catacombs all over the city where we huddle in fear.
We are not without hope. We know the world is watching. We know the prayers of nations challenge us all to remain assured that they will, somehow be answered. The satanic Putin wants his evil soldiers, his minions (although we think some waver and even sabotage their efforts) heard his intention when he commanded that not even a fly can get in or leave the steel plant caverns of Mariupol, or even our root cellar or the basement of City Hall.
All this time, our noble UGF fight on to save our country, to save our traditions, to save our freedoms. There have been victories, for sure. We have been relentless in our resistance, but now that many are underground, it’s rather hard to be opportunistic and destroy their tanks or attack with accurate snipers. Yes, as I said, our brave UGF did shoot down a Russian plane, but at great price. Yay, it was a short-term victory, but its demise burned a city block of homes a block from my family’s hiding place, its residents, our neighbors, scorched in an instant. Crosses stand in their memories, their bodies hastily buried beneath humps of ground in their own gardens. We only assume we got their names right. God knows who they were in this mortal life. They will rise in the last resurrection on the last day. We will one day see these dear ones.
The officers who are with us here in this dungeon at City Hall where the mayor and his staff are captive, tell us the offensive has changed. Indeed it has. The Russians have redoubled their efforts. They want Mariupol. It is significant, especially if they can’t conquer Odessa. Russia so needs a seaport. Early in the invasion, they conquered the tiny island known as Snake Island, which came under fire from a warship off the coast. The defenders were heroic, and later, reports of the Ukraine army sinking that ship encouraged us. Also, some of the defenders lived, although the Russians threatened to kill them all. In fact, the world had already surmised that they had indeed been lost. Apparently, that was not the case. They lived to fight another day. We count that as a double win!
I have texted reporters who have to tell our story. No longer do I have the power to do so. My fellow City workers tell me a very pregnant lady has no business out on the streets trying to save us all. So, we silently huddle in darkness, without little food or water. Reporters tell us corpses are visible in the streets and on the news feeds we still receive, we see our tall apartment buildings look like shells of dollhouses, with belongings tossed about as if an angry child had a tantrum. Yet, we know, this brutality was committed by gun barrages many miles away indiscriminately intending to beat us into submission. Our own City Hall, battered and burned, stands above us in ruins.
When I allow myself the self-pity, I wonder who will find me, Kataryna and my yet unborn daughter. I have named her Anastasya, like my sister’s name, which means resurrection. I have called her Ana Hope since I first met her sonogram two months ago, before all this horror started. Actually, two days before the invasion.
Since, I have read Isaiah 11: 6-9 the prophecy. It says, and I believe it to be true in the darkest of moments, there will one day be a Peaceable Kingdom. God wrote it, He meant it, and I claim it, that: “ The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
She should be born soon. God willing, her eyes will see victory, the tulips blooming in the city square, the graceful fruit tree branches swaying in the spring breeze. They’ll be decked out in chartreuse with tiny catkin blooms. They’ll preside over banks of daffodils, and soon the lilies will arise announcing Easter glory.
She will not be born in the maternity hospital. A cluster bomb destroyed that facility and killed mothers and babies that day. I expect to give my last ounce of energy to delivering my child, child of hope, I pray little Ana will be raised as a courageous Ukrainian and will one day proudly serve as an independent citizen in this land I so love.
I repeat Mary’s Magnificat from Luke chapter 2. We are in similar circumstances: far from home and family, delivering children to a dangerous world, threatened by government authorities or would-be hostile rulers, in darkness and lack of resources. The cradle Joseph surely built for Baby Jesus is vacant, as is the one Petr built for our Ana. With the mayor’s wife, fortunately a nurse, I will deliver my little one, and I pray this new daughter of Ukraine will grow up in our independent nation among those who will love her well. Meanwhile, I repeat the Virgin’s prayer: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for He has been mindful of the humble state of His servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me—holy is His Name.
“His mercy extends to those who fear Him from generation to generation. He has performed mighty deeds with His arm; He has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their throne, but has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things, but has sent the rich away empty; He has helped His servant Israel, remembering to be merciful to Abraham and His descendants forever, even as He said to our fathers.” (Luke 1:46-55)
We retell the Easter story. It brings us hope. We pray for our families. We pray for our friends. We pray for our nation. We pray for our rescue. We pray for sunshine—we have not seen the exchange of day and night for over a month. We have no idea whether the sun still shines, for we can trust only what we see. Nothingness.
My travail starts. At first, I smile at the prospect of meeting my Anastaseya. But, that prospect is mixed with the same fear every mother feels as she faces her delivery. Can I do this? (Can I do this here, with bombs falling and sirens blaring?) What kind of world is she entering? Will I be able to nourish her outside my womb? Will she meet her father? Will she, or I, either or both, survive this hell, this situation? Can I do this? Will she ever know how much I love her? Will she grow into a woman of purpose? Will I see her marry? And the ultimate question on every woman’s heart, will I be a good mother to my daughter? The litany continues as the pains wrack my already-weakened body.
Eventually, to the raucous bomb blasts and sighing sirens, I hear the birth cry as I in the pain of Eve’s curse bring her forth. We wrap her in a tablecloth from the cafeteria two floors up in the building, exposed to the outside through gaping walls. She doesn’t much care, I’m sure, but I long for the comfort of family and assurances that all is well. This is certainly not the sterile birthing suite I had envisioned.
And so, I say to my little one, lying here on my breast, “Welcome to the world, little one. I bless you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I am your mother, mama, and your daddy and I have waited so long to meet you. Don’t worry, my darling, docka. This place is just temporary. You won’t remember it, but this is where you will first know that I love you, and with my whole being, I will be here for you. Your name is Anastaseya Hope, and you will be a strong Ukrainian woman if I have anything whatsoever to do with it. I love you. God bless you, little one. God bless you this day and always.”
Yet, my mother’s heart soars at the sight of my daughter, the hope of my life, and the hope of Ukraine. Her middle name will be Hope, and she represents a new beginning. Pandora’s last treasure was hope in the old legend.
Springtime and hope seem to go together, don’t they? God renews His blessing, and with the prayers of nations, we hope to rise again to greet Easter’s dawning.
When you come to Chernikiv, I shall be at my post, welcoming you to what is left of our beautiful city, and perhaps you will meet my little one and watch as she embraces all that is free, and independent Ukraine, and the city we both shall love as long as we live.
I wish I could tell you the end of the story. Like every life story. it may remain for the next generation to tell one’s legacy adventures. As a writer and a citizen of this war-torn world, I pray Anastaseya Hope may live to tell it to her children’s children in a free, independent Ukraine.
About the Author
