Valeria Troubina
Neringa Naujokaite
Aurelia Mihai
Hamburg 05.03.2022
Ruth Maclennan
Theodosia means gift of God. The city is ancient, founded by Greeks in the 6th Century BC. Crimea has always been desirable, and was settled by Khazars, Tatars, Greeks, Genoese, Russians and Ukrainians, and many others too. Theodosia is the port from which the Black Death was carried to the rest of Europe by sailors. I took this photograph on a hot summer’s evening in Quarantine, the oldest surviving neighbourhood of the Genoese city.
Looking at this picture now I wonder what happened to the boy who was reaching to the sky, swinging and balancing, beautifully poised in his element. The sky was so blue it felt like a substance you drown in. A little over a year after I took the picture Crimea was seized almost bloodlessly by Russia, and annexed. This was the beginning of the war that was kept at arms-length by the rest of the world, hoping it would just go away. The Russian invasion of Ukraine twelve days ago has shocked the world, although those who have lived through and been traumatised by the eight years of fighting in the Russian occupied territories, in Donetsk and Luhansk, were perhaps not surprised.
The boy in the photograph is now old enough to be fighting and could be on either side.
Michelle Deignan
Liza Dimbleby
Thinking of women in wartime, March 8th 2022
Katja Stuke
Manuela Morgaine
“And I learned how faces crumble,
Under the eyelids, how anguish emerges,
And the pain is etching on the tablets of the cheeks,
Similar to the rough pages of cuneiform signs;
How black curls or ash curls
Become, in the twinkling of an eye, silver,
How laughter fades on dark lips,
And, in a dry little laugh, how fear trembles.
And I pray to God, but it’s not just for me,
But for all who share my fate,
In the fierce cold, in the torrid July,
In front of the red wall gone blind.”
Anna Akhmatova, Requiem.
Kyoko Kasuya
Ivana Vollaro
