Here we are with the third post about Kiev.
The Majdan clashes were the days of rebellion and protest against the former president Yanukovych. To understand those days and how the population felt them, one walk over the Majdan square is enough. There are candles everywhere. Pictures of fallen demonstrators placed where they were killed. Some panels show photographic shots from the battlefields in the south – east region of Ukraine. Many people mobilized during that period. It is so that you could hear many scary and impressive stories about those days. In front of us we see the hotel where the snipers started shooting down demonstrators. Psychological pressure, endless false bomb alerts and bombing threats are common stories among the people. Someone tells us how he was ready to hide out in the forest with his family. Fortunately, the entire situation calmed down, Kiev went back to normality, the fighting now are around the far away border hundreds of kilometres away and no one here had to run into the forests.
While I’m wandering around I ask to myself how it can be sad and hard to face a so difficult period and with just few certainties.
Apart from churches and main monuments, we decided to visit the Yanukovich palace. Something that could distaste every rational person, a kind of modern Versailles just 30 km away from Kiev. A residence, Mezhyhirya, that the former president realized in just few years. A residence somehow turned into a private property. This place during ancient times hosted a monastery, later on has seen the bolshevists, than the Germans, again the communists and at the end the private property destined as personal presidential residence. It looks like the luxury festival, extreme residences and houses, kilometres of private heated roads, golf camps, private museum full of cars’ collections, lakes where to fish, there is also a galleon anchored at a dock and a private zoo where animal were farmed before to end up on the presidential dinners. Since November 2014 this place ended in the hands of the new forces that decided to render the place a museum open to public. This way today, we are here, probably within the first Italians visiting a residence that looks like sorted out from a fairy tale, finally opened to citizens and tourists. We are here in a great sunny day, enjoying the river’s shore that laps this residence without any sense, symbol of the disparities between normal people and the powerful ones, disparity clearly visible in that tall wall with electric wires that the former president order to protect the residence and himself.
Don’t miss the last post about Kiev, click here to read it!
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