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| "Sunflower for Ukraine": photo, collage & digital. |
2GN2S ...
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Photo: Nikodem Nijaki |
60 pairs of iron shoes now line the river's bank, a ghostly memorial to the victims. 'Shoes on the Danube Promenade' by Can Togay and Gyula Pauer.
* I got to see the shoes personally on a trip as a coach with the USA Jr. Team competing at World Karate Jr.Championship in Budapest, 1990. We took the kids on an evening tour, since we had no free daytime. I can still remember the eerie feeling standing there with the shoes by the Danube by moonlight. | ||||
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This month marks the 151st birthday of Ukrainian poet, Larysa
Kosach-Kvitka. She used a pseudonym, Lesia Ukrainka, because in the
Russian empire, publications in the Ukrainian language were forbidden.
Known for her plays, poems and for her political activism, Lesia
Ukrainka is regarded as one of the most notable Ukrainian writers of
Ukrainian literature. She traveled extensively throughout Europe and
Egypt in search of treatment for tuberculosis, and she learned much
about the world beyond her native land. Writing from Vienna in 1891 she
said, “I look at the Europe and the Europeans before me, and I want to
say something true even though I’m on the sidelines… My first impression
was that I had entered another world – a better world, a freer world.
It will be much harder for me now when I return to my country. I’m
ashamed that we are so enslaved, that we carry such heavy shackles and
sleep so peacefully under them. I have awakened, and I am sad and I
grieve; I am in pain…”
Kosach-Kvitka had a gift for languages, speaking English, German,
French, Italian, Greek, Latin, Polish, Russian, Bulgarian, and her
native Ukrainian. She wrote prolifically in spite of a debilitating
illness that often kept her bedridden for months.
Excerpt from Rufin and Priscilla (1908)
“If this continues, we will soon become
strangers in our native land,
exiles from the heavenly state,
because it has no place in our world,
and we can not get there,
where we must first die to come to life
and lose all human likeness,
to become not people and not gods,
but something like a shadow, like smoke, like steam. ”
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| Cardinal (pyrrhuloxia Cardinalis sinuatus) |
Thanks for coming by today.
