Tipping off the night train, full of memories of his life there 3 decades back, the writer finds a changed city fighting for survival
My first level in Kyiv was a number of metro quits outside the city centre, just contrary Volodymyrskyy market, in a nondescript mid-20th century block. The lease was organized by message. It took me 5 days to drive there from Edinburgh in an old Polo in November 1991. Discovering my way to Kyiv was very easy– one road from Calais takes you right there– but once I got to the outskirts, I must have made use of a paper map to browse with the city. I spoke no Ukrainian, and enough Russian to ask standard instructions, but not enough to understand the response. I might check out the road indicators. I discovered a garage round the back and started to dump my stuff.Recently, I went
back. I crossed the road from the square by the metro and went through the market. It’s a neater, quieter location than I remember from the very early 1990s, not a lot due to the war as from the steady changes over the intervening years, when peasant farmers around Kyiv became less and post-communist grocery stores and industrial food distribution systems replaced the old state shops. In the weeks prior to and after the 1991 mandate, when Ukrainians elected to leave the Soviet Union, precipitating its fast fragmentation, I mosted likely to the state shops to queue for cheap, rationed, frequently scarce items such as bread and difficult cheese; the marketplace was an area of lots and, for residents, high costs. Row upon row of countrywomen in aprons offered huge jars of sour cream, chalk-white towers of cottage cheese covered in muslin and pots of horseradish in beetroot juice, along with vendors from the Caucasus offering persimmons, pomegranates and fresh coriander, and pickle sellers with buckets of Korean carrot salad and wild garlic stalks. All this is still bountiful in Kyiv, still locally made, yet packaged and piled on grocery store racks by large companies. Nobody’s selling homemade sour cream currently– probably they’ll be back in spring?– there’s just one pickle seller, and the meat counter is no more quite the shrine to pork fat it as soon as was.
Source: The Guardian