And then the monk lit my hair on fire

There are almost as many Great Patriotic War memorials (the glorifying kind) here as there are churches. Which makes me sad, because the Ukrainians got totally fucked in the Great Patriotic War. The Soviets destroyed Kiev themselves before fleeing the Nazis, who were in charge just long enough to kill about two million people. Once the Soviets were back in charge, they got to killing alleged Nazi collaborators. They took the peasants' seed grain when crop yields weren't high enough, which promptly led to another famine in 1946. (The first Soviet-induced famine was in 1932-33 -- something like four million people died. There are some famine memorials as well, but the severity of the famine now seems to depend on the mood of Ukraine's relationship with Moscow: When they're getting along the famine wasn't quite so bad.) Soviet territorial gains from the Great Patriotic War meant that the Ukrainians finally got to live united in a place called Ukraine, but they had to live there under Stalin. No wonder their collective sense of humor is so dark.

Back on the church front, the Pecherska Lavra is kind of like a cross between the Vatican and the Kremlin. It started as an underground monastery about a thousand years ago, and has since grown into this huge complex of churches and museums and gardens, plus the caves (which are more like basements than caves, but I guess they probably started as caves). The 'caves' are not that well-marked and are generally confusing, so when I finally found the first set of them I asked the monk near the entrance if I could go down. He spoke good English and he wanted me to buy a scarf to cover my head (not sure if that's cave-policy or just his personal/religious preference.) Then he bought me a cross with my money (he couldn't believe I'm not Orthodox) and gave me some kind of blessing and put the cross around my neck, while holding a candle, burning some of my hair in the process. He was good to have around, though, because he gave me a little tour and told me about the history of the monastery. It took forever, though, because he had to kiss every icon and relic, sometimes several times. So there we were, the monk and me, down in the caves lit only by candle light, talking about kissing (icons), and I started to wonder why he wasn't more sweaty in his long monk robes. He didn't smell bad at all. And he had long hair and a scruffy beard. And nice teeth.... It's a good thing I don't believe in hell, because I'm headed straight there. The more he talked, though, the less attractrive he got. He told me about how "we have the saints and they prove that Orthodox is the right religion." When I told him that there are a lot of Russians in Brooklyn he made a face and said "Jews." "Are Jews not Russians?" I asked. "They speak Russian. That does not mean they are Russian. I'm speaking English, does that make me American?" Nice teeth, but he was a lot more attractive with his mouth shut.

No photos that direction! You could be arrested.

It seems like I should remember the Chernobyl accident. I was eight; that seems old enough. And it was a pretty big huge deal. But I don't remember it at all. Twenty-five years later (yikes), they send tour groups there. I hate tour groups, but I could not have talked my way into the exclusion zone.

I was bracing myself for it to be horrible and depressing. (On the bus from Kiev they tried to show a documentary which probably was pretty depressing, but the DVD kept stopping and finally they gave up.) But you know what? I thought it was beautiful. At the power plant itself there's not much obvious evidence of disaster, aside from some memorials, and the buildings and machinery are big and dramatic and it happened to be a clear day with a bright blue sky and the sun shone on the rust and the angles and the trees and the water (artificial rivers and a lake for cooling purposes, but still sun shining on water usually looks nice) and it was all very striking and very pretty. Which was pretty weird.

Chernobyl (Chornobyl in Ukrainian) is the town after which the power plant was named. It's mostly deserted now, but a few people do monitoring and administrative work there and there are a few houses with little gardens out front (yikes). At the power plant itself, the three reactors that didn't explode stayed operational after the accident. The last one was shut off in 2001; apparently for political, not safety, reasons. There is still containment work to be done, but it's currently on hold because of money and problems with contractors. A few people still work at the plant for monitoring, but on a Sunday it was pretty deserted. (The cafeteria was open, though -- maybe only for tour groups? They assured us the food was safe and no one made the obvious dumb joke of asking if it was local.) Pripyat is the town where the plant workers lived and it's now completely abandoned. It wasn't evacuated until a full day after the accident, though. The people were told that the accident wasn't severe ("to maintain order") and that they would be allowed back in three days (they weren't). A few people refused to leave and were dead within a few weeks. The people who left were eventually allowed back to get some of their things, but no one ever lived there again.

All of which sounds depressing as hell. Is depressing as hell. Plus, everyone who helped put out the fire and contain the disaster died soon after. And the people in charge at Chernobyl were so un-glastnost-y that Mikhail Gorbachev found out about the explosion from Sweden, where elevated radioactivity was detected days later after the wind blew it there. (That's the story, anyway.)

But like I said, it doesn't look like disaster or destruction now. Even the abandoned buildings in Pripyat were more interesting than depressing, to me anyway. More than that, though, the people there really don't play the tragedy card. I mean, they recognize it as tragedy (how could you not?) -- there are lots of memorials, for example -- but it was 25 years ago and life goes on and they don't seem to be actively mourning. And, Ukrainians have this dark sick twisted sense of humor that is probably good for coping and also makes them hilarious, once you get over feeling bad for laughing. I went to this exhibition for the 20th anniversary of Chernobyl and it had a whole section about the jokes people told after the accident. (The only one I remember was something like 'Reagan calls up the Pentagon and says "Cancel the Soviet nuclear offensive program. They've gone self-service."') Yuri, our guide, was wearing a Hard Rock Cafe Chernobyl t-shirt. The front of his shirt also said "Save the planet" and the back had what looked like a tour schedule, only it said things like Iodine 131 and Strontium 90. Before he took us to what was the school in Pripyat he said, "This is perfect school -- no teachers. But it is also perfect school for teachers -- no children. Perfect school, now we have it. Let's go."

Cover me

(some browsers fuck with the spacing and I can never figure out how to fix it -- very annoying)

The National Art Museum of Ukraine defines 'national' pretty liberally, including ethnic Ukrainians who lived/worked in other places and people of other nationalities who worked or spent time in Ukraine. (That's a fact, not a value statement.) I was sort of struck by how much the village scene paintings from 100+ years ago look exactly like what you see out the window of a train going across Ukraine today. Ukrainian peasants had a pretty turbulent, horrible last century -- Stalin made sure of that -- but you wouldn't know it from looking at their houses.

Anyway. I think living in Kiev would mostly make me very grumpy. The winters are long and cold and snowy (windy too, I bet) and spring apparently lasts about two weeks and two of the three early-June days that I've spent here have been just-barely-bearably hot. But the Kievans do take good advantage of the few warm/hot days they have and on a day like today when the weather is perfect, it's pretty glorious. There are little outdoor concerts all over the city and you can drink beer in the parks and depending on where exactly you are the river has little beaches or islands or outdoor 'cafes' that serve plastic cups of beer or abandoned industrial grit. On weekends they pedestrian-ize some of the main streets and this afternoon there was a little parade and a stage on the main square had traditional music and dancing (including an act by an 'art collective' of little kids).

There's just a good vibe here, even at the brew pub with the adequate cover band. The Kievans were getting down to Bon Jovi and the Beatles, but they really got excited when the cover band played the only Ukrainian song of their whole set. If people like the Ukrainian music so much, I don't understand why I don't here more of it here (and so then less of Sting and George Michael -- east Europe loves those two). I guess there's not a huge market but still, you'd think a country of 45 million people could give the cover band a little more to work with.

Might like to drink whiskey, might like to drink milk

Holy crap there are a lot of churches here. Gold domes everywhere you look. There is a legend that back in the early days of the Rus (10th century), Prince Volodomyr I (Vladimir I if you're reading Russian history) was deciding whether the Rusyns were going to be Catholic, Byzantine (Orthodox), Jewish, or Muslim. He sent out fact-finding missions and allegedly immediately rejected Islam because of the no-alcohol rule. Whether or not that little detail is true, the Rus became Orthodox and about fifty years later Prince Yaroslav built the Santa Sofia Cathedral in Kiev and now it's one of the places you must see if you come here. Yaroslav is buried there, along with some other dead princes and important religious people from a long time ago, and there are 12th century frescoes. Some of them are even pretty interesting -- more fierce creatures and little devils. There's also a typical Mary and Jesus icon-style scene (not from the 12th century), only made mosaic-style out of Ukrainian Easter eggs by a Ukrainian artist named Olga-something with crazy hair. I don't think you're supposed to take photos, but I did anyway.

Religion in Ukraine is confusing. I guess almost everyone is basically Orthodox. (Seems like everyone who's not a tourist crosses himself three times when walking past a church.) But one kind of Ukrainian Orthodox has a patriarch in Moscow and another kind has a patriarch in Kiev. And in the (formerly Catholic-Polish-controlled) west there is also the Uniate (aka Greek Catholic aka Ukrainian Greek Catholic) Church, which looks and mostly acts Orthodox but also recognizes the Pope. Talk about covering your bases. I also can't get a straight answer on how religious the people here really are. I've heard several people say that almost no one goes to church, and I've heard others say that communist repression made people even more religious and so now lots of people go to church. They've got plenty of options, anyway.

Hot, hilly, and crowded

Kiev is big and loud and hot and crowded and I like it. So far it mostly feels a lot like Moscow but also a little like New York, and I like that too. The subway stations are so deep that if you walk on the escalator you'll tire yourself out, even going down, but if you don't walk you'll get bored because the ride is so long. They play music anyway, and sometimes the escalator music sounds like Tetris music (which makes sense because Tetris is Russian, blah, blah). The river is good to walk by; there's a sort of dilapidated walkway with good graffiti and a few stray dogs where couples make out and trash piles up and arty types brood and old fishermen fish and drink vodka. And I had a really good Georgian lunch of something with beans and something with cheese and something with eggplant and it was spicy and flavorful and good. (Even before I lived in New York and had friends who read food blogs, I knew that Georgian food is basically the best thing ever.) And, even though it meant waking up at 5am, I was able to get here not on an overnight train. So far, not bad.

It hadn't really occurred to me to miss being in a big city, but it feels good now that I am. (Incidentally, someone told me that no one really knows how big Kiev is (the internet seems to agree on about 2.6 million people) and that population estimates are based on bread sales. I can't find anything confirming that claim, though.)

Severin, down on your bended knee

Apropos of nothing, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who wrote Venus in Furs and after whom masochism is named, was born in Lviv.

Anyway, about a thousand years ago there was the Rus. The Kievan Rus to be exact. It's where both Russian and Ukrainian history sort of started, although it was originally ruled by Vikings. (Russian histories like to gloss over the Viking part.) The Rus had a complicated ineffective system of hereditary rule where all the brothers of the current prince were in line ahead of the current prince's sons for next in charge, and it made everything all fractured. By the time the Mongols showed up and took over in the 13th century, the Rus had split into three Rus-lets, each of which was its own little disaster. The part of the Rus that would become Russia, or part of the Russian empire anyway, regrouped on its own and the part that would (eventually) become western Ukraine came under control of sometimes Lithuania but mostly Poland and, when Poland ceased to exist, Austria. The western Ukrainians living under Polish rule could join the noble class, but they had to assimilate and basically 'become' Polish. Ukrainian culture belonged mostly to the peasants, until some scholars took up the subject in the 19th century; and western Ukrainians didn't live in a place called Ukraine until after World War II. That's why at Lviv's huge Lychakiv cemetery the old graves mosly have Polish names and the newer ones are mostly Ukrainian: Ukrainians have always lived here, but peasants weren't buried in mausoleums. I assume that's also why there is not a ton of Ukrainian art besides contemporary stuff and icons (unless it's all in Kiev). Some of the really old (like 15th century) Ukrainian icons are actually pretty cool. A lot of them are judgment-day-themed and have all kinds of little Bosch-like devily-y guys and monstery-y creatures and snakes simultaneously eating and impaling people.

Anyway, at the cemetery I met this adorable old man who works at the war memorial there. We could barely communicate but he was really trying and once we established that I'm here by myself he decided that I should take a Ukrainian boy home with me. I don't know how to say 'they're not exactly knocking down my door' or 'in these shoes?' in Ukrainian, Russian, or Polish, so we agreed (I think) on 'maybe.' Actually, if I met a boy here who I liked enough to take home with me, I might just not go home. I could stay in Lviv for a while. I don't know how to say that in Ukrainian, Russian, or Polish either, though.

Bottoms up

Train travel in Ukraine is a little maddening. At the train station there is only one line for advance tickets, even if that means that 30 people are waiting in that one line and no one is waiting in the other lines. And each line is closed for ten minutes of each hour -- a different ten-minute chunk for each line -- so there's this stupid musical line dance that happens every time a line is about to close. And, even if you pay the extra money to go first class, you still might end up sharing a sleeper car with a fat man who strips down to his small underwear to sleep, and snores, and doesn't like black or Turkish people. (He was nice to me at least -- showed me photos of his kid and insisted on sharing his dinner with me -- my being the right color and all.) But, if not for my dinner with Andrey the racist, I would not have made it to Lviv (one slow overnight train is apparently the only possible way to get between Ukraine's second and third largest cities--there aren't even any flights, even though both cities have airports), and that would have been a shame.

I love Lviv. It is so beautiful and so lovely and so charming that I sort of want to give it a big hug. There are all these beautiful churches and cute little squares and big plazas with fountains and tiny cafes, and there are good restaurants and hardly any tourists. It has a big old university and a beautiful opera house. It's basically the perfect European city. Which is kind of weird if you're like me and have only ever really thought about Ukraine as it relates to Russia. Turns out it's more complicated. What is now western Ukraine spent most of its modern pre-World War II life as part of either Austria or Poland, and it really shows. Odessa felt entirely Russian to me; aside from the language and absurdity at the train station, Lviv doesn't feel Russian at all. (Even the language isn't actually Russian -- people mostly speak Ukrainian here -- but to my gringo ears they sound the same.)

Anyway, I usually roll my eyes whenever a city is referred to as 'the next Prague' but seriously, people, come here before everyone else does. Just try not to come via the overnight train from Odessa.