Lviv

Yesterday morning, I returned to Berlin from Lviv/Lwow/Lemburg/Leopolis, the hometown of great writers, poets, perhaps some of my ancestors, and the Jewish theorists who coined the terms "genocide" and "crime against humanity." My phone says I’ve walked 25km/day, Google 17.4. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, and I spent most of them with Liana, my friend/penpal/guide/fixer.

I always enjoy my time in Ukraine, because I find the country so fascinating, in a way I don’t see elsewhere (perhaps I visited Armenia a few months early). Even now, four years after the revolution, the mark of recent events, and their ties to incidents (real and imagined) deep in the local history, culture, and psyche is made clear in monuments, street art, and even clothing, greetings, and hairstyles. It helps that most of the people I know there studied politics and history alongside me in Estonia, and are involved in shaping the country’s future, but even a casual tourist can't escape the signs. In Lviv’s airport, TVs showed footage of Crimea with the tagline, “Crimea: Still Ukraine,” and a PSA showed a family picnicking near a dam while a counterterrorism team, guns drawn, searched for saboteurs. Nearly everyone I spoke with (despite their ethnicity) grew up speaking Russian at home, and in adulthood made the switch to Ukrainian.

Back in Germany, it’s nice to recognize words immediately, instead of slowly deciphering each letter (through immersion, I managed to finally memorize the Ukrainian alphabet and finally make sense of Greek’s (I think I managed to figure out everything except the soft sign, and the differences between X, Ц, Ч, Ш, and Щ (ch, c, č, š, and šč)). Still, while it’s impossible to bike through Kreuzberg or Mitte most weekends without running into a demonstration, I’ll miss the feeling of potential I get from Ukraine, this being the place with the most wasted and untapped potential on the continent. Even if every stalled and failed reform leaves me feeling like Charlie Brown once more failing to kick Lucy’s football, I’m reminded of Ukraine’s guardedly optimistic anthem, which declares that “Ukraine has not yet died.”