Every Ukrainian Must Be At Least Once In Chyhyryn...

You must put everything aside, quit worrying about your drab life, daily complaining about all those bad people who seem happy while you are not, break the habit of seeing our dirty streets and the monstrosity built on Independence Square. You must stop your daily routine, forget about going to work, and pack and just board a bus or train and go to Chyhyryn!

Of course, it would be ideal to walk all the way – if you have the time and will. Why? You will understand later, after you get there, walking through the fresh and fragrant woods, where the Kho breaths loudly in the thick of the brush (you will then vividly remember the fairy tale you read a long time ago, when you were small and did not want to become thoroughly urbanized). When you amble over to the next wild meadow with a herd of divinely beautiful horses grazing, as though painted in juicy colors (it will be some time before you realize that they are for real, that you can jump and mount any one of them and gallop the rest of the way like a Cossack), when you swim across all those rivers, still warm, with catfish the size of whales dozing off in the clear depth, when you walk all those dirt roads trodden by the feet of countless Ukrainians over more than two thousand years (it will be then that you suddenly become tense, struggling to picture those two thousand years, thinking of the word combination Ukrainian parentage, looking at it as though it were a huge pear suddenly landing on your head, dropping for some reason from a pine), when you finally reach the milestone reading Chyhyryn Land (you will actually read Welcome to Chyhyryn District, but you will know that the legend has a different meaning than that intended by your contemporaries that wrote it, adding the national emblem, strictly taboo only a decade ago, now displayed in most unusual places and contexts).

After all this happens you will step into the town of Chyhyryn. You will immediately meet a student, his head clean shaven except a long oseledets lock of hair worn in the Cossack style. You will not be surprised at all. Nor will it cross your mind that the young fellow could be an extremist of sorts, one of those sitting on the square. You will want to know his given name and will envy his having walked to Chyhyryn while you drove (because you had no time to walk, of course). You will suddenly feel that you have entered Chyhyryn as a different person than when leaving Kyiv. You will have lost some of your height and become heftier, precisely the size of an old Cossack svytka short jacket you had seen at Ukraine’s only Bohdan Khmelnytsky Museum (you will have just been told that our ancestors were like that, not the way they are painted). It will be vitally important for you to know what had happened to the coffin with Khmelnytsky’s body originally under the stone plate in his church in Subotov. You will want to get down those tunnels under Chyhyryn and try to find it (no one will risk it because the tunnel caved in when they were building premises for a tractor team). You will suddenly feel that there are live Cossacks somewhere there under the surface of the earth, those that survived the battle, that they are waiting for a normal citizen of this independent Ukraine to get down and join them. You will stand by the entrance cave at the Kholodny Yar ravine, cold wind blowing in your face. You will think that you will need a handful of torches before stepping inside, because there is that wind blowing from within, meaning there must be an exit somewhere. And you will realize that of course, you will find a way out of any situation, something you would not even dream of that morning.

You will be shown the blueprints of restoration of Khmelnytsky’s residence and you will wish the enthusiasts the heartiest of success; you will feel that their idea is yours as well. Let this place become the capital of all the presidents Ukraine is destined to have (it has to be destined to become finally happy, does it not?). You will want everybody to see that huge 56 km. rampart built with Cossack hands, so everyone will understand that the Egyptian pyramids are great, of course, but not that original after all. And here modern machines broke down, trying to repeat what had been done manually by our ancestors. You will suddenly notice that you said ancestors differently, with a special warmth and sadness, regretting not having visited the place earlier and that the ancestors have stopped waiting.

You and your friends will try to embrace the 2,000-year-old oak tree, the only one in the world. A whole horse was buried among its roots last year, a sacrifice meant to keep the tree alive. And it is alive, except that it yields acorns no longer.

You will regret having mollified yourself so banally, figuring there were so many bad people around and that you were no match for them. It was just that had embarked on the wrong life path. Now you see the truly good people, there they are, walking around, singing, offering you a third helping of the yushka fish soup, telling you about an old man living in the neighborhood who wrote his first novel at 70 and was then invited to attend a young writers’ convention in Kyiv. You will suddenly realize that he has performed the entire folk vocal repertoire of Cherkasy and told you three volumes of stories, the one that has brought you to this forest, and that he is a member of the academy of sciences, professor, and a humble deputy to the local governor. Kurt Vonnegut would have said that things like that happen sometimes.

And then you will be on your way home, totally confused and overwhelmed, telling yourself and others deadly serious that every Ukrainian must visit Chyhyryn at least once in his life, and that he will never make any blunders after that, he will not put up with the garbage on Independence Square, and will want to play a cassette with Anatoly Solovyanenko for the world to hear – like you and your friends will do back home from this magical trip.