Wanderer on the Steppe

An amateur writer, a bumbling artist, but – alas! – a skilled and experienced procrastinator. Hopelessly in love with Eastern European history, the Steppe, coyotes, lizards, and jackals. And did I mention dragons?

[kaenith]

❤️🧡💛💚💙💜 Happy Pride 🩵🩷🤍🩷🩵

[wanderer-on-the-steppe]

Dear idiots in my neighbourhood,

I hate that I'm probably that kind of morose elderly neighbour to you now who gets angry when "young people are having some fun" (though I can't see you properly and don't know if you're really that much younger than me or still can't use your brains after spending some decades on Earth).

But this is the first night after an 11-day long terrible heat wave that people have the chance for some cool air to come into their homes through the windows, and you are blasting your music as loudly as you possibly can. Meaning that everyone who hasn't been able to sleep properly from the heat all this time now has to decide whether they want to be kept awake another night by your music or close the windows and keep suffering in their hot flats. Flats that are 35°C in some cases.

This is not some harmless annoyance. A person died in his hot flat last evening, here in this house. (For those who have read the post about my neighbour yesterday: no, he has not survived.)

Use your goddamn brains.

[wanderer-on-the-steppe]

There was a medical emergency in the house today, directly above my flat. Ambulance, firefighters, police… everyone trying to get a neighbour out of his flat who had secured his door with… thing the name of which I don’t know in English (and not even in my own language to quickly look it up)… so now when he couldn’t open the door himself anymore, no one could easily break it open and they worked on that door for what felt like an eternity while no one knew if the person behind was dying.

And by now everything has been quiet again for over an hour, I don’t know if they got to him in time, because when it finally sounded like they were transporting someone down in the elevator, I have no idea if that person was alive or not, and my own mind is wandering back to that time the ambulance came because my partner had collapsed on just such a hot summer day like this, more than twelve years ago. 

On that day, we’d been lucky. It was nothing too serious. Great relief after moments of horrible dread.

We didn’t know on that day that only a few months later an ambulance would come for my partner again, and police too, and… other word I don’t know in English and can’t find in the dictionary… this last person for my partner’s parents and me, because their job was to talk to those left behind after… catastrophes of that sort (this word I do know in English, but I’m preferring to keep it cryptic).

Strange, strange evening. No person in danger of dying or maybe already dead deserves to just be a starting point in someone’s mind to remember another. And yet, that’s what the famous anonymity of city life does. But even if I don’t know this neighbour enough to be able to feel more than some vague sadness for him that’s probably more a "the things life does to us all…"-sadness:

May the man they carried down in the elevator today recover. And may no one who loves him be visited by the person whose job it is to try to say some comforting words where there are none. 

[alaskanay]

American Kestrel | Raptors of North America

[melestasflight]

@wanderer-on-the-steppe for your raptor collection.

[wanderer-on-the-steppe]

Than you so much @melestasflight! What a joy to see!

[vintage-ukraine]

Sophiiska Square by Borys Spornykov, 1974

[slavic-folklore]

🇺🇦 Ukrainian folk costumes by Ariadna Efimovna Perepelitsa

[loveisinthebat]

Woolly boyo

[sonyaheaneyauthor]

A postcard featuring an advertisement for bandura lessons by the Ukrainian bandurist Vasyl' Potapenko in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Circa 1925

[kf1n3]

Rewatched Spirit recently and wanted to do a quick 2 hour painting study

[folklorespring]

Kryvorivnia village, Ukraine. Photo by Paraska Plytka-Horytsvit

[igotintotrylogiarecently]

[theophan-o]

I was absent here for quite a long time, being preoccupied with another things (even though still somehow related to our favorite Cossack hero), but now I have got something I simply HAVE to share with another Bohun-loving Souls. Look. Only look. It is a book. It is real. The first comprehensive biography of Bohun even written and published in Ukrainian by the Publishing House "Klio" in Kyiv. A masterpiece by Tatiana Tairova-Yakovleva. 624 pages about Him, using some newly discovered sources. I am delighted, perhaps only a bit worried, that such a book has not been written by me😊 But, after all, it is a historical monograph. About Bohun’s afterlife we have here only one short chapter, ten pages (p. 592-601). So there is still another book to write: about His image, both in Ukrainian and Polish cultures, changing and developing through the centuries, from folklore to literature, arts, cinema, theater, popular culture, etc. Sometimes idealized, sometimes demonized, still alive 😊

[folklorespring]

Kosiv ceramics

[flippantsmeagol]

Take two.

[thejawsdevour]

Marat Sadikov (Uzbek) - Untitled (gouache, 2015)

[vintage-ukraine]

Illustration for a children's book by Valentyna Ulianova, 1980

[thelostcanyon]

Douglas' Spirea (Spiraea douglasii), Siletz Bay National Wildlife Refuge, Oregon.