How to describe destruction? Through smells and sounds.
Old wood and dry lacquer – that is the smell of the House of Scientists after the explosion. The smell of antiques turned into debris in a single second. The smell of intellectual refinement mixed with concrete. On Deribasivska Street, it smells of coffee and gunpowder simultaneously. This is not a metaphor. It is simply a morning in a city that has decided to continue.
And the sound. Not music – the dry rustle of the plastic sheets used to cover shattered windows. The rhythmic tapping of hammers nailing plywood where there used to be a view of the sea. This sound is not about despair. It is the metronome of a new norm. Every strike says: we are staying inside.
Behind the cathedral wall, it smells of damp plaster and burnt wax. In hotel lobbies, it smells of expensive perfume and fresh paper. There, they compile reports, drink coffee, and assess damages. The first instinct is to erase. To fill. To restore as it was. What they call reconstruction, we call an act of lobotomy. Any attempt to return cities to a sterile appearance destroys the very thing that emerged within them: the memory of matter that met chaos and held.
For institutions, a crack in a facade is a loss of value. For us, a crack in a wall is a line of strength. When I look at these scars, I see a resistance that cannot be simulated in any design bureau. They are trying to turn our ruins into a museum. To localize pain in specific points so that the rest of the space remains “normal.” So that one could arrive, photograph the tragedy, and return to a silence where nothing cuts the eye.
But we do not want to live in a museum.
It is happening everywhere – from Kharkiv to Kherson, from Mariupol to hundreds of villages that no longer exist on the map. I see a child drawing with chalk on the plywood covering a storefront. I see a woman sweeping broken glass into a neat pile by a tree, not trying to hide it. People are returning to semi-ruined houses. Their presence no longer depends on the integrity of the walls.
I have seen people drinking coffee near shattered displays. This is an assertion of a new aesthetic. An aesthetic where broken glass is not trash, but the only honest witness. It does not shine. It cuts anyone who tries to look the other way.
A concrete blockade unit has become part of the urban landscape. A rocket crater – part of the courtyard. We are not clearing this away. We are building around it. We need an architecture with a memory – not one that suffers from amnesia, but one that wears its wounds as structure.
“Southern Palmyra.” “Little Paris.” They always made us understandable through foreign names. Wrote us into a familiar catalog. Now, we do not fit.
Restoration is an escape. An attempt to pretend that the burn never happened. To paint over our scars means to paint over our subjectivity. To return us to the state of an object – into a convenient horizontal line that does not irritate the eye.
We choose the verticality of the ruin that refuses to fall.
We do not want to return to the silence that existed before 2022. That silence was an illusion we maintained ourselves – we pretended that we, too, were allowed to choose anesthesia. That this unbearable tension was a pathology, and not a sign that you are alive.
Beneath that horizontal line, a verticality lived the entire time. Now, it is visible.