The Eurovision final should have taken place this weekend (stupid virus), so it’s time to revisit the best performance the competition has ever seen: Ukraine’s Verka Serduchka in 2007!
As I say every year, I’m a dot in the video. I was travelling with my brother at the time, and I think we were the only people in Finland who were accidentally in Helsinki on Eurovision weekend!
Filed under Ukraine
Христос Воскрес! Happy Ukrainian Easter!
It’s a strange and horrible time for a holiday. Ukrainian Easter, possibly the biggest day of the year in my culture, is not going to be the same this year.
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Happy Ukrainian New Year! As Ukrainian Christmas doesn’t happen until the 6th – 7th of January, New Year happens in the middle of the month.
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Today is Christmas Eve according to the old calendar, and tonight millions of people (including Ukrainians like me) celebrate with a twelve-dish dinner.
With the disaster surrounding us and a house full of smoke, this is going to be an odd one.
I’m not planning on watching Eurovision this year, but seeing as it’s Eurovision weekend (as well as election weekend in Australia!), here’s the best performance in the whole history of the competition: Ukraine’s Verka Serduchka in 2007.
The event took place in Helsinki, Finland that year, and I was actually in the cityi with my brother at the time. We are in the footage they broadcast from the city’s main square.
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Today is International Dance Day, so please enjoy this performance of the Hopak, the national dance of Ukraine. Most people have seen these steps, these big jumps, and these costumes, but few realise they’re Ukrainian (those baggy trousers and the headdresses with the ribbons are distinctive Ukrainian national clothes, and not worn by Russians). It’s what most people would probably call “Cossack dancing”.
The fact it’s from a telecast on Russia-1, a television station that now dishes up anti-Ukrainian Kremlin propaganda day in and day out, is not lost on me!
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We made ninety-five varenyky this afternoon, for Ukrainian Christmas Eve tomorrow. Here are some of them:
A memorial to the dead I photographed in 2016.
Today is the fourth anniversary of the end of Ukraine’s Euromaidan revolution. On the 20th of February, 2014 pro-Russian snipers took to the streets and shot and killed as many civilians as they could manage.
Snipers in the same spot the memorials are now.
The revolution resulted in overthrowing the corrupt, dictatorial oligarch in charge of the country, but he fled to Russia and paved the way for Putin’s invasion shortly afterwards.
Filed under Photography, Travel, Ukraine
Huge congratulations to Ukraine’s Oleksandr Abramenko for his Olympic gold medal win in men’s aerials freestyle skiing! It was not expected.
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Capital life and random beauty… 