Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Way too many people are coming here looking for the Oct. 2 wedding of Evgenia Tymoshenko and Sean Carr - but all they're getting is a three-month-old Times piece about it...

So here's more stuff:

- from the Guardian - Ukraine's wedding of the year;

- from the Times - Bells, bagpipes and a bit of a do . . . Ukrainian style;

- from the Independent - Ukrainian love story pairs a billionaire's daughter with a Leeds rocker;

- from the BBC News - Ex-Ukraine PM's daughter marries;

- from CNN.com - Tymoshenko's daughter weds rocker;

- some AP photos at Maidan.org.ua;

- a story and some photos in Ukrainska Pravda (in Ukrainian)...

Too bad Ukrainska Pravda very promptly took down the photo of Oleksandr Volkov and his female companion marching to the evening celebration: some people are concerned about Sean Carr's temperament and his criminal record, but you know it's no longer relevant when you see tough guys like Volkov and Mykhaylo Brodsky as wedding guests. No one would want to mess with them, not even a crazy-looking fellow like Carr. (Another photo that Ukrainska Pravda got rid of was of Mykola Tomenko, and it probably happened because his female companion looked like a cow.)

***

What I really like about it all is the eccentricity of Evgenia Tymoshenko: the air of eccentricity around her that does not diminish even in the presence of men like Volkov and Brodsky.

What I hated about the wedding is this little episode involving Paraska Korolyuk, an elderly woman who became one of the symbols of Maidan last year. According to Komsomolskaya Pravda (in Russian), baba Paraska arrived in Kyiv on a train Friday morning to attend Evgenia's wedding, bringing a beautiful wedding gift with her, a Ukrainian traditional towel, rushnyk, that her daughters had spent three days embroidering:

"I want to lay it underneath my grandkids' feet in the church. Why are you surprised? Yulia is like a daughter to me, and that means that Zhenya [Evgenia] is my granddaughter. Yulia has personally invited me to the wedding."


Someone from Tymoshenko's Batkivshchyna party picked baba Paraska up at the train station and drove her to the party headquarters, where she spent about an hour and then emerged, no longer looking boisterous and happy, and without her rushnyk. She'd been told that the wedding was in three days and that no one was invited to the church ceremony, and since she had nowhere to stay in Kyiv, she intended to take the train back home that same day.

Silly old fool, a heartbreaking silly old fool.



And - so much for the "I've come here as if to my own family, to my mama, my daughter" kind of blah-blah-blah from Tymoshenko...

3 comments:

  1. I hate to say this, as I don't want to jinx them, but I doubt this marriage will last. In all of the photos of them their eyes don't meet. Even when they face eachother they look away. Turning away baba Paraska is probably just icing on the ill-fated wedding cake. I could be wrong.

    10.05.05 - 7:04 am

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  2. Thanks for the links - love the photos! and yes, I am happy (silly me) that Yulia has had her roots finally taken care of. I wish the couple all the best - as I would with any couple. Mazeltov!

    10.05.05 - 7:58 am

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  3. I went to LSE with Evgenia. She was an airhead. Marrying a violent superannuated rocker from some kurort romance is entirely in character.

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