10 rooms from the Mariupol city hall, the local dom sovietov which was bombed by the separatists of Donetsk People’s Republic last year.
This year is different, the blackened ruins are standing in the middle of the city in the peaceful summer silence, waiting for their uncertain future together with the citizens of mariupol.
(me as an emerging consumer in the early 1990s in my father’s trabant)
I always identified as “east european”, more than anything else, including my nationality or the pretentious “Budapest citizen” used by my fellow Budapest intellectuals to distinguish themselves from the general hungarian reality which they regarded as “racist” and generally backward (arguably with some truth in it). What this east europeanness meant for me precisely, would be the object of another post, but coming to ukraine with a group of international experts meant the first case when i started to feel as someone “from the west”, with the allures and assumptions i associated with this position. Besides my freshly acquired status as an “expert” (which i still find hilariously exaggerated), this feeling arised from the huge and unmistakeable difference between the europeanized, polished misery of my central european homeland and the authentic and real stagnation of this abandoned borderland of Europe.