Art, Youth and A Shared Peace

We made our journey to Lviv in Ukraine on the 2nd April. We were invited to the launch of their European Youth Capital 2025, a brilliant and beautifully organised series of events with hundreds of young people participating with energy and activism. This is the start of our collaboration with the team that runs the EYC and the young people of the region with our new Council of Europe funded pilot project called Art, Youth and A Shared Peace.

This will be a 10-day cultural exchange in late June which invites young people from Lviv, Ukraine, to the United Kingdom, where they will collaborate with British young people in fostering cross-cultural friendships, creative expression, and solidarity through arts and music workshops with cultural activities and the use of the creative arts for collective healing.

Francesco Pipparelli and Zoe Cochrane, two of TCFT’s most experienced Youth Leaders, Robert Golden, photographer and film maker, and I all went on this short visit. We asked Robert Golden if we could share his Substack essay about our visit to the beautiful city of Lviv and the people who live there. He has movingly described for all of us our sense of being in this great city at a time of war.

More information on this page at the beginning of May.

Tina Ellen Lee
Creative Producer

Lviv, Ukraine’s Youth Capital for 2025

Witnessing Savage brutality and inspiring humanity

A Ukrainian sculpture and flag overseeing an event celebrating Lviv as the centre of youth. photo: Robert Golden/TopFoto

In Lviv, western Ukraine, circling out of this ancient Galician city, our taxi driver slammed his breaks to avoid hitting the car in front which had done the same. My wife and I and our two young compatriots lurched, unsettled. Other cars around us stopped. The driver of the car in front jumped out, glanced down the road, then stood to attention with bowed head. Our driver, without a word, did the same. We saw others around us emerge and bow. A van approached with…with…a coffin inside and then another and another following in banged up military and civilian vehicles filled with exhausted soldiers and stressed faces of loved ones, friends and others. They passed, one after another after another in silence with warning lights flickering.

We were left speechless, somber. This ever-so-European country is pervaded with sorrow, anxiety and grieving souls, bravely hidden behind a sense of determination and dedication to their ways of life, to their food, their folk traditions, their children’s futures and to the ways they love and dream. They do not wish to live in an enforced totalitarian state ruled over and silenced by a mad man and his henchmen.

I recognised bravery is not doing what you do when you expect to win, to be ok, to survive but rather it is when you maintain who and what you are in the face of a terror that you believe may prevail. As history tells us, ‘you can kill a person but not an idea.’ Worth reminding Putin of this crusted pearl before he runs out of his young fodder for the meat-grinder.

The previous night we attended a memorial service in the 17th century baroque Garrison Church of Saints Peter and Paul. We sat amongst the families of the dead. An elderly woman spoke to me in German. She was the great grandmother of a beautiful blond child bouncing around near us. The women told me the child’s mother is her granddaughter whose 27 year old husband had just been killed.

Mourners in the Church during the commemoration photo: Robert Golden/TopFoto

In song after song, stories were told of an individual or groups of soldier’s deaths. In song after song at the end of each piece the people’s voices rose as one in response. We sat amongst a lamenting community struggling against horror, a community of extraordinary bravery, and in our experience, a community of tenderness, kindness, politeness but whose underlying grief exposed their need to maintain their European values of freedom, equality, enquiry and fairness. Towards the end of the commemoration, lights illuminated the ceiling across which the names of the recently fallen were projected, moving slowly from the front to the rear of the space across the painted clouds. People were silenced. Tears. Gulps of unending sorrow.

A singer in the commemoration ceremony photo: Robert Golden/TopFoto

I began writing this in our hotel’s basement bomb shelter. ‘At two this morning a blaring announcement rattled our room that Ukraine was under attack by Russian fighter bombers from the far west of Russia and from the Black Sea in the south, the body of water supposedly agreed to be neutral by the enemy and Ukraine.

We wondered, how specific or random this warning was. We were advised by the announcement and by an email from one of our hosts to go to the shelter in the basement of our hotel. We duly went.

A mother with child, an elderly woman, a dedicated young German youth worker, a young female student wandering in the pages of her book and the four of us amongst others. Neither my wife nor I felt fear but something equally distressing: our concern for the wellbeing of our two lovely young partners (from The Complete Freedom of Truth project*) in these events and for the people of this bereaved country. We both spoke about our stunned anger if not to say repressed rage at these (mostly) male psychopaths of our species: Putin, Xi, Orange, Vance, Modi, Le Pen, Orban, etc. causing endless pain amongst their citizens and others, causing unnecessary deaths amongst the poor and hungry of our species while helping their rich patrons to become richer.

Hotel bomb shelter, 2 AM….photo: Robert Golden/TopFoto

Around 3:30 AM we received a note from one of the organisers that all the attacks seemed to be aimed at Kiev, much further east than where we were. She told us she thought it was alright to go back to our rooms. We did so, collapsed into bed only to be re-awoken about an hour and a half hour later with a second warning. The app we viewed on our phones showed us that while it was possible that anywhere in Ukraine could be attacked in this second wave, it was unlikely to strike at Lviv. We decided to stay in our room.

The App at about 2am

At some time in my disrupted sleep I heard a heavy deep throated sound in the distance growing ever louder. I thought, maybe this is it. I cuddled my wife and said we will be alright under the duvet. She smiled. Soon we realised it was an early morning streetcar rumbling through the newly fallen snow.

We could not help to think that this is what the Ukrainian people go through almost every day and night and how their beings, their lust for life, their protective arms wrapped around the aged and their children are trembling whilst their resolve to maintain their European civilisation is unshaken.

Reading from a distance about the war, caring about the war and those dying and crying is a profoundly different matter when one sees the tragedy up close.

At about 5:30 AM we were again awoken with an announcement that penetrated our room, telling us all was clear. ( listen to the announcement) Later we learned many had died in Kiev.

Sound Recording

On another day we were invited to meet a professor in the Ukraine Catholic University. There was a small exhibition of photographs in which one side of each was a building or a street as it had been for centuries and on the other side, perfectly matched, was an image, but of its war damage. It shook me, seeing this terrible wasteful violent destruction of a society’s cultural fabric form the nightmares of one sick individual.

We also saw an exhibition of mostly paintings by recovering soldiers. The images were mostly jangled, filled with horror, agitation or dread. They were an agonising reflection of their conditions and made us question how a post war Ukraine will need huge help on a personal level for the inevitable widespread trauma.

Paintings by Veterans from Art Therapy at the Unbroken Hospital, Lviv.

We were hosted by young mostly women organisers for this special moment celebrating the selection of Lviv as the European Youth Capital 2025. Their embrace of the ‘internationals’ was filled with admiration, curiosity, delight and also comfort. They felt by our presence, less alone, less abandoned.

Solomiya Koval hosting the ‘internationals’ at a dinner. photo: Robert Golden/TopFoto

Go if you can help. Help if you can. Open your hearts to them as we should also do for the Palestinians and Israelis in opposition to their murderous racist and nationalistic governing parties.

The Names on the Church Ceiling

Ignoring our potential power as individuals and groups is no longer an acceptable option.

Film by Robert Golden

*Opera Circus and it’s international youth programme The Complete Freedom of Truth are partnering with Lviv’s European Youth City 2025 in a Council of Europe/European Youth Foundation project called Art, Youth and a Shared Peace. This will take place in late June in Dorset and London. It is a 10-day cultural exchange will bring young people from Lviv, Ukraine, to the

United Kingdom, where they will collaborate with UK young people in fostering cross-cultural friendships, creative expression, and solidarity through arts and music workshops with cultural activities and the use of the creative arts for collective healing. Further information: admin@operacircus.co.uk Fund raising in process.

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