{"id":112265,"date":"2024-08-08T12:54:56","date_gmt":"2024-08-08T09:54:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theukrainians.org\/naivni-sady\/"},"modified":"2024-11-26T00:59:15","modified_gmt":"2024-11-25T21:59:15","slug":"naive-gardens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.theukrainians.org\/en\/naive-gardens\/","title":{"rendered":"Na\u00efve Gardens"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Documentary photographer Sergiy Polezhaka has been capturing the war since 2014, but what still amazes him is how fiercely people cling to their frontline gardens, flowerbeds, and orchards. Along the line of fire, he meets people who water roses beneath the ruins of their homes, clear mines from their fields so they can graze cattle, and decorate garden rockeries with fragments of Russian shells.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They do this without waiting for a ceasefire: under fire, under occupation, in villages that have been wiped out. When they evacuate, they take bundles of seedlings with them, and for a long time, they lament that the climate in Poltava or Cherkasy is not the same as in their native Izyum or Donbas, as if they\u2019ve moved thousands of kilometers away from home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sergiy\u2019s \u201cNa\u00efve Gardens\u201d project was born from his thoughts on how to explain to a foreigner what the land means to a Ukrainian, literally, the soil that grows apple trees and cucumbers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cI first started photographing gardens and how people interact with their space when I went to Irpin and Bucha on the anniversary of their liberation. An Italian journalist and I were traveling together, talking about the war, and he was genuinely surprised that people didn\u2019t leave their homes. He said, \u2018I wouldn\u2019t fight; I\u2019d go somewhere else, and no one could make me fight for territory.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wanted to explain our context through a paradox. On one hand, we have a lot of land, and it\u2019s very fertile. But at the same time, we\u2019ve constantly been threatened with losing it: first serfdom, then collectivization, and now this great war. You live and work hard on the land that feeds you, but there\u2019s always a risk of losing it.\u201d<\/p>

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\u201cI think this is why we\u2019re so reluctant to become refugees, why we\u2019re so determined to stay and defend what we have. People don\u2019t want to lose what they\u2019ve invested their lives in. They don\u2019t want to wander around Europe or the rest of the world. Now that they finally own this land and work it to sustain themselves, a stubbornness takes hold. I saw it in a village in the Kyiv region, where a woman was carefully tending colorful flowerbeds against the backdrop of the charred ruins that were once her home. On the other side of the house was a plowed field, clearly waiting to be sown. This is also about naivety: people often keep doing what they\u2019ve always done simply because they\u2019re used to it, because they don\u2019t know any other way to live.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn Northern Saltivka, the district of Kharkiv that has suffered the most from Russian shelling, I met a woman who returned home after months of evacuation. She laughed at herself, saying she must be out of her mind, because the first thing she did when she got back was run to the three apple trees she and her neighbors had planted by her driveway. She hugged them and cried.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSo, this story isn\u2019t just about gardens or even about Ukrainians. It\u2019s about a sense of home. It\u2019s about putting so much effort into something and seeing the fruits of your labor endure, they waited for you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cI also wonder how the Ukrainian village will change after the war. Fence-sitting might no longer be relevant. I wonder if we\u2019ll continue to fence ourselves off from our neighbors with high walls, considering how people helped each other after shelling, watched over abandoned houses to prevent looting. After all, it\u2019s clear now that a fence won\u2019t protect us from the real threat, a cruel, big neighbor from the north.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People paint flowers around shrapnel holes in their fences and decorate mines (hopefully defused) because they need to. It\u2019s their way of saying \u2018fuck you\u2019 to the war. They tell it, \u2018You have no power over me. Now, you\u2019re just part of my decor.'\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Translation \u2014 Marta Gosovska<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a7\u00a7\u00a7<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[The translation of this publication was compiled with the support of the European Union and the International Renaissance Foundation within the framework \u201cEuropean Renaissance of Ukraine\u201d project. Its content is the exclusive responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union and the International Renaissance Foundation]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Why Ukrainians Keep Tending Their Gardens While Everything Is on Fire<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":151,"featured_media":110431,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2232],"tags":[2342,2242,2236],"class_list":["post-112265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reporters-en","tag-gardens","tag-society","tag-war"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.theukrainians.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.theukrainians.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.theukrainians.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.theukrainians.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/151"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.theukrainians.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112265"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dev.theukrainians.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112267,"href":"https:\/\/dev.theukrainians.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112265\/revisions\/112267"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.theukrainians.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.theukrainians.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.theukrainians.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.theukrainians.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}