Everyday Life and Forms of Resistance to the Enemy under Occupation: Memorates of the Population of the Village of Ivankiv in Vyshhorod District of Kyiv Region

Authors

Bondarenko Halyna

a Ph.D. in History, a chief of the Ukrainian Ethnological Centre Department of M. Rylskyi Institute of Art Studies, Folkloristics and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv, Ukraine).

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3448-494X

Koval-Fuchylo Iryna

a Ph.D. in Philology, a senior research fellow at the Ukrainian and Foreign Folkloristics Department of M. Rylskyi Institute of Art Studies, Folkloristics and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv, Ukraine).

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4048-9114

Taran Olena

a Ph.D. in History, a senior research fellow at the Ukrainian Ethnological Center Department of M. Rylskyi Institute of Art Studies, Folkloristics and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv, Ukraine).

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0548-0678

Everyday Life and Forms
of Resistance to the Enemy under Occupation: Memorates of the Population of the Village of Ivankiv in Vyshhorod District of Kyiv Region

Abstract

The experience of living under occupation among the residents of the village of Ivankiv in the Kyiv region is analyzed in the article. The cultural and anthropological aspects of everyday life during that period, as well as the existential and moral choices people faced, are described. The main themes of the local narrative tradition are identified and structured. Contemporary memorial practices and the role of places of remembrance within the village’s symbolic space are considered. The source base of the submitted article consists of the published memorizes from 2022–2023 and new interviews recorded during a field expedition to the village in April, 2025. The study of deoccupied territories with the aim of their further cultural reintegration is one of the current cultural and anthropological scientific tasks today. Recording new eyewitness testimonies, analyzing widespread narratives show the significance of public interest in their lived experience, the value of collective support for the individual. The stories about the events of that time, contain constantly the motifs about people who managed or failed to avoid death, about ways of surviving during the occupation, about queues for bread. At the same time, people have reinterpreted their own history, that’s why plots typical for the local narrative tradition arise. The war continues, new important events displace partially previous memories. At the same time, stories about the beginning of the war, the first days, first impressions, the first dead and rescued have become folklore, remaining both in the memory and in the stories of local residents. The issue of memorializing the events of the war has arisen after the deoccupation of the village. The memorial space of the village consists of organically connected memorials to the victims of the Holodomor, those who died in World War II, including 365 representatives of the Jewish ethnic group shot in 1941, as well as to the community members who died during the ATO/JFO period (2014 – February, 2022). The tradition of erecting memorials during the Russian-Ukrainian war creates a «register of sacred history». Now public memory is a part of the symbolic basis of the collective life and often underlies the sense of community identity.

Keywords

military everyday life, occupation, space of memory, local narrative tradition.

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