National Days & Anniversaries
Ukrainian Language Day, 9 November 2005
A day for a language, marked by a foreigner still learning it.
National Days & Anniversaries
Independence Day and the other dates in Ukraine's calendar, each read against the state of the country in that year.
National Days & Anniversaries
Knowledge Day 2005
My second first of September, and the year I stopped being the person who did not understand what was happening.
National Days & Anniversaries
Independence Day 2005: the year after, and the bill for it
The first national day since the Orange Revolution arrives with the coalition that made it visibly cracking, growth down from eleven per cent to under three…
National Days & Anniversaries
Ivana Kupala 2005
Fire, water, wreaths on the river and the shortest night of the year — the oldest layer of the Ukrainian calendar, and the least explicable to…
National Days & Anniversaries
Constitution Day 2005
A greeting for the day a country marks having written its own rules for itself — and nothing further, because the arguments about them are not…
National Days & Anniversaries
Easter 2005
A classmate took me home to his family for Easter. I understood almost none of it and it remains one of the warmest days I have…
National Days & Anniversaries
International Women's Day, 8 March 2005
A greeting for the day the whole country buys flowers, and a note on what the day looks like from inside an office.
National Days & Anniversaries
Day of Unity, 22 January 2005
A unity day greeting a few months after I arrived, when I was still learning what the day was.
National Days & Anniversaries
Christmas, 7 January 2005
A Christmas greeting at the end of a winter that had been anything but quiet.
National Days & Anniversaries
New Year 2005
My first New Year in Kyiv, spent in a student flat with people from four countries and not enough chairs.
National Days & Anniversaries
St Nicholas Day 2004
The nineteenth of December, when children find something under the pillow and the winter holidays properly begin.
National Days & Anniversaries
Holodomor Remembrance Day 2004
A candle in the window on the fourth Saturday of November. I learned what it meant in my first months here, and I have lit one…
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