What do Kyivans do when the weather gets nice? We go for a walk to Maidan. The clear skies, the warm temperatures, the flowers springing up seemingly overnight – it’s beautiful and refreshing and we all take a deep breath and exhale in relief that we’ve made it through another winter. We go to Kreschatik street, which is closed to cars every weekend year round and becomes an unofficial, spontaneous festival on weekends when the weather is nice. Musicians play for spare change, you can get your picture taken with Spongebob or Bugs Bunny, you can buy Kyiv souvenirs or a football club scarf, and you absolutely must get an ice cream from the street kiosk. The cafes and restaurants open onto the sidewalks, and you stop for a cold beer here, a hot coffee there, and you watch the people walking by and they watch you.
This weekend, the first weekend of spring and the first truly warm days of the year, is no exception. Kyivans came out on Saturday for our first spring stroll along Kreschatik. Families and couples and friends, many dressed in their finest; elderly walking slowly, leaning on canes, babies in strollers, children dashing about, teenagers snuggling and kissing on park benches.
There is an exception this year, though – Kreschatik is not closed with orange cones or just for the weekend. The EuroMaidan barricades are still in place, piles of tires and planters and furniture and street signs and barbed wire and sandbags six-seven-maybe eight feet tall block the streets and sidewalks around Maidan.
We enter through the narrow gap in the barricade, and it is quiet. The costumed entertainers are out as usual, but Spongebob and Bugs Bunny stay outside the barricades. The souvenir stands are selling EuroMaidan Revolution calendars and Ukrainian flags and scarves and pins. The shops are open, as they have been throughout the past four months. People wander in and out of them, part of the weekend walk tradition. The protestors’ tents are still all around, people still living in them, keeping watch over the revolution, not yet ready to completely trust the new government, not yet ready to take their eyes off it – the politicians need to remember they are accountable to The Maidan.
The sidewalk bricks are piled in huge stacks all along Kreschatik and Maidan, pulled up by protestors to use in self-defense against the police during the clashes in December and January and February. Meager weapons against the bullets shot by the Berkut special forces, but somehow, defying logic, the protestors armed with sticks and bricks and Molotov cocktails beat back the Berkut and gained ground on February 20. (Here are two videos from that horrible day, the second one in particular is very, very hard to watch.)
Looking up, I see the burned-out shell of the Trade Unions building on the far side of Maidan.
We approach the square, the Maidan, and there are flowers everywhere, candles everywhere, memorials and shrines to the brave people who fought here, who died here.
We turn to go up Instytutska street, and we pass through the inner barricade, under the bridge, into the more dangerous territory (more dangerous then, when they were fighting). The flowers are piled nearly as high as the barricades here. There are pictures of the men who were shot here. It is so quiet, so somber, so heartbreakingly sad. Parents are here with their children, teaching them about the heroes of Maidan, whispering like in church, no one wants to disturb the solemnity. I can’t take a picture here, I don’t want to take a picture here. This is a sacred place.
We pass the second barricade and onto the “territory” that was under Berkut control then. I look to the right, towards the presidential administration building. I look to the left, towards the Verkhovna Rada, the parliament building. We go towards the parliament, we want to see it again now that the fences are gone. The ousted president had the fences erected around parliament shortly after he was elected four years ago, to keep the people away. But he is gone now, and so are his fences.
We walk through Marinsky Park, one of our favorite places in Kyiv and part of every Kyivan’s weekend stroll tradition. But for three months it was “behind enemy lines”, occupied by the police and Berkut forces and the staged “Anti-Maidan” demonstrations.
We walk down the hill along Grushevskoho street, past the Cabinet of Ministers building and the Dynamo football stadium. Police buses blocked this street for months. Protestors built barricades here too, and piled up the street bricks to defend against the attacking police. We pass through, single file, the one tiny opening that’s been made in the wall of tires.
Narrow passages are between the piled bricks to let one car pass through at a time. No one honks impatiently at the snail’s pace of traffic at Grushevskoho. It’s quiet here, so unusual for a Kyiv street in spring.
Igor takes me to the spot where he delivered wood throughout the terribly cold winter months when people stood here day and night, between the first and second barricade lines. I didn’t know he was coming this close to the front, and I’m glad he didn’t tell me then. One day he helped stack the street bricks here.
Drivers carefully navigate around a huge pile of flowers in the middle of Grushevskoho street.
And we navigate around them on the sidewalks, too.
We walk home, each quietly contemplating this spring day, this hard winter that has finally passed, what we’ve seen, what we’ve felt. We sit on the balcony in the evening, windows open to the fresh spring air, cleansing our lungs and our minds and our souls. And we grieve together and we start to heal together.
Anka in Kyiv 