Karol Darmoros, with Alina Petrauskaitė, Svitlana Duchovych
A home full of culture
Iryna Plechova holds a PhD in social communication and is the deputy director of the Kyiv Culture Cluster, a municipal network of cultural centers. Her husband is a director. Their three-room apartment in the center of Kyiv resembled a gallery and a library: it contained over 5,000 books, and the walls were covered with works by Ukrainian artists.
The first Russian attack damaged the apartment on June 15. Another one, carried out on July 2, completely destroyed it. “We survived by a miracle,” Iryna recalls.
An image amid the ruins
In their home prayer corner was a traditional wooden plate from the Carpathian region depicting the Last Supper. “When we entered the apartment, we saw amid the rubble that the only thing that remained almost untouched was this very plate with the icon,” the Ukrainian woman recounts.
It became for her “a symbol of God’s presence in the most difficult moments of life.” Together with her husband, she presented it to Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, Secretary for Relations with States and International Organizations of the Holy See. The papal envoy visited their St. Nicholas parish in Kyiv on July 18.
Destroyed memory
Lost in the ruins were first editions of works by Ukrainian writers persecuted by the Soviet authorities, books with author dedications, and a collection of underground photo-gazettes of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church from 1986–1989.
Iryna emphasizes that culture and identity are inextricably linked. “Every attack on cultural values is a desire to erase the identity and distinctiveness of a nation,” she says.
The value of true freedom
The memory of collectivization, the Holodomor, and World War II survived in her family thanks to “silent resistance”: praying in their native language, embroidering traditional vyshyvankas, learning Ukrainian poetry, and passing on banned books.
“The value of independence is the value of true freedom: the freedom of the citizens of this country, the freedom of the children of God, the freedom of people who can choose their own path,” Iryna Plechova points out.
