Kyiv in 2016: a family return, remembrance and small kindnesses

A city connected to childhood memories

Some journeys begin long before a ticket is booked. For me, Ukraine was connected with songs, Christmas carols and the language I remembered hearing from my grandparents. Returning was not simply a matter of choosing which landmarks to visit.

The original account tried to explain that attachment to Dario and, in a different way, to our daughter. Zosia was too young to understand the history that filled my thoughts. She experienced the people and streets directly, while I kept comparing the city in front of us with the one I carried in memory.

We were stopping on our way to Georgia. That short stay made ordinary encounters feel unusually concentrated: a walk, a conversation and a pause outside a church had to hold more than a longer trip might ask of them.

Remembering Maidan and the wall at St Michael’s

In the 2016 journal, Maidan and the memorials were inseparable from the events of 2014. The photographs outside St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery show rows of portraits, flowers and candles. This was not a visit before conflict had touched Ukraine; the losses were already visible.

Standing there with a small child changed the scale of the scene for me. The wall held individual faces, while our own family was simply passing through the city. It brought the public history we had been discussing back to particular people and families.

The original post contained immediate political and religious reflections. This restored account keeps the personal experience of remembrance without presenting a visitor’s impressions from 2016 as a full explanation of Ukraine’s institutions or subsequent history.

Two strangers who helped us find a taxi

One memory from outside St Michael’s is much smaller than the history around it. Two young women helped us call a taxi. They were studying in Germany, and a practical conversation became a moment of connection between people whose paths would otherwise have crossed without a word.

That kindness remained with me alongside the places we visited. It did not solve the questions in my original article, but it gave the visit a human warmth that a list of sights could never fully describe.

When restoring an old travel diary, these details matter. The day is not only a record of where we went; it is also a record of who helped, what felt familiar and which small moments survived in memory.

The portraits we saw before leaving

At the airport we encountered Exhibition 16, a display of portraits that became another powerful image from the stopover. The two photographs here are different views of that same installation, rather than two separate exhibitions.

They belong beside the memorial wall in this journal because both made us stop and look at faces. We are keeping their original context and date. Nothing in these images establishes the condition of the airport or the display today.

Following the story into the next journey

Our arrival in Tbilisi continues the family journey from a different angle: a sleeping child, too much luggage and the difficulty of walking the last short distance to an address. Read that opening as part of the same historical route, rather than as a current flight connection.

The hope at the end of the original Kyiv article was for peace. Preserving that hope does not require pretending that the years since 2016 have stood still. The photographs remain a personal record of a place we cared about, at a particular moment in its history.