I'm reading Roksolyana by Osyp Nazaruk, a fictional account of Hürrem Sultan's life, written circa 1929 (UKR, available online in .txt format).

Interesting to learn that Crimean Tatars' female slave trade didn't really affect Ukrainian nuns:

[...] For even the wild Tatars respected the nuns and stepped out of their way with reverence, calling them "the girls of the wondrous [gâvur] Prophet who died on the cross." [...]

Also, interesting to learn that Ukrainians back then believed that Tatars - "the dirty monsters" - were "born blind, like dogs."

On a different note, Marta has a friend here whose dad happens to hate Turkey and the Turks - possibly, because he's very patriotic or something, he sort of explained to me today. We were talking about real estate in Istanbul, and, for some reason, he felt it necessary to make this disclosure. At the same time, he spoke of Moscow with awe, so I guess he meant some kind of a Pan-Slavic patriotic feeling, not exclusively Ukrainian. Then again, he spoke of Greece with awe, too, so maybe it's the Orthodox Christian thing. Or both. I didn't bother asking him to explain some more, because people who believe that "patriotism" is about hatred really bore me. It's kind of funny, though, that his daughter is spending much of her life with a nanny who is half-Uzbek, quarter-Tatar and quarter-Bulgarian, and whose son's father is Jewish and daughter's father is German.

Anyway, while I was writing all this, I got reminded of this story:

Customers help stamp out Turkey's sex slaves

By Meriel Beattie in Ankara
December 28, 2005
The Independent

An unlikely hero has emerged in Turkey to rescue victims of forced prostitution: the brothel customer.

While the country's security forces are hardly renowned for their attention to human rights or sympathetic treatment of women, they have been chalking up impressive successes in finding and freeing trafficked women from brothels.

In the past six months, 100 women - mostly from Ukraine, Moldova, Romania or Russia - have been rescued from sex slavery and Turkish police have broken up 10 trafficking networks.

There are two reasons for these results. A charge-free hotline was set up in May by the UN's International Organisation for Migration (IOM) for women to call for help. It is staffed by multi-lingual operators who try to pinpoint where the women are - and then send in the police.

But the second, more unexpected, factor is the chivalry of the Turkish brothel client. Since the hotline started, 74 per cent of tip-offs have come from men: customers who have learned to spot the difference between a professional prostitute, and someone who's been forced into it. [...]

More sanatoriy interiors:

Misha's father was buried on Wednesday - may his soul rest in peace.........

Obolon:

Marta and a really tall cactus :)

Pushcha Vodytsya has this dreamy feel about it that's been somewhat hard to find elsewhere in Kyiv lately.

As anywhere else, you have to be in a dreamy mood to sense it, of course. If you aren't, you'll end up seeing little else but garbage and neglect - just like anywhere else.



The downside of this dreaminess is that there doesn't seem to be a single decent place to have coffee or beer here.

Some more sanatoriy interiors:

Self-portrait :)



...taken in a marshrutka at the edge of the village of Moshchun... :)

A public bathroom at the sanatoriy:






And a detail of a Ukrainian-made hand dryer there - called Rushnychok, "a little towel":



Might take a while to figure out how it works: it is so not automatic, you actually have to move a tiny sort of a lever to the left to switch it on and then to the right to switch it off...

I've accumulated too many pictures from Pushcha, Gorenka, and a village called Moshchun, but, as always, don't have enough time to post them. Didn't have internet yesterday, too...

Here's another random Gorenka pic:

A well in Gorenka:




P.S. Here's the same well - and the same house behind it - three years ago:



***

P.P.S. Looked through my 2006 Pushcha Vodytsya and Gorenka pics, decided to make this post slightly longer - because, like the house and the well, some things are getting better and some are getting worse...

***



This building had burzhuy - 'a rich bastard', more or less - written on it in 2006 (I probably do have a picture of it somewhere, but not on Flickr). I'm not going to transliterate the newer message here, the one above burzhuy - a rough translation is enough: "You're a dickhead." It sounds harsher in Russian, of course. Hundreds of people, including kids, are passing this centrally-located building every single day as they walk and ride to and from Gorenka in marshrutkas and in their own cars. It's kind of funny that many of them would probably act offended if you used the word zhopa ('ass') in front of them, and yet they seem capable of tolerating this derivative of the famous Russian three-letter curse. Also, imagine having to pass this building every day with a kid who has just learned to read...

***

Speaking of kids and reading, and things that are improving - sort of, kind of - here's a picture of the gates of the Gorenka school in 2006:




And in 2009 (please note that the school is located a kilometer or so away from the cursing building):




Here's my quick translation:

You should love the book - it's a source of knowledge.

***

Only those nations that have their own national schools can be strong in spirit. - Kyrylo Stetsenko

***

Study, and read, and learn from foreigners, and do not disdain your own. - Taras Shevchenko

Strays in Pushcha:

Why we are here:

In Gorenka, today: