Kyiv, Pt. 5

 This weekend I've had some time to take a walk or two around town. I've visited some important monuments, but also seen some stuff that made me laugh, or at least smile.

First, the serious: on Saturday, I took the metro a couple of stops from the center to find the memorial to the victims of Babyn Yar. This is the site where the Nazis murdered more than 30,000 residents of the city, mostly Jews, in late September 1941. Throughout the period of the occupation, the site continued to be used for political executions, and many thousands more died. It is the first site associated with the Holocaust that I can remember visiting and, not surprisingly, it was sobering.


Today, during the course of my walk, I was on one of the central streets of the city, and stopped at this memorial and display about the Holodomor.The short version of what is a difficult and politically contentious event: in 1932 and 1933, mass famine killed more than a million people, and perhaps many times more, in the parts of today's Ukraine that were then part of the Soviet Union.

There has been much debate about the extent of the famine, its causes, the role of Stalin and the Soviet state, and much more. I'm not an expert, so I'm not going to weigh in on the issue. However, it is definitely worth reading into.

Suffice it to say, history in the city of Kyiv is a pretty intense subject.

On a lighter note: spectacular bridge-construction fail.

That yellow structure? Yeah, that's an enormous crane on a barge that was part of the construction of a bridge across part of the Dnipro. Then it capsized. And apparently they don't have another crane big enough to rescue this one.

Finally, "Yellow Submarine" is apparently a restaurant specializing in hotdogs. Their advertising? Pictures of famous people . . . eating hotdogs!