The Magnet
Memory is a strange thing. Sometimes it’s like a mirage. Walking down a street in Kyiv, she suddenly spots a building with a distinctive triangular pediment, and for a moment, she’s back home on Volodymyrska Street, where she grew up. In her mind, she can already see the familiar balcony on the second floor, covered in grapevines. They used to collect buckets of pink, incredibly sweet grapes—eating them, making juice, sharing them with relatives. Below the windows was a garden where her mother grew poppies—huge, not red, but the color of the sun setting over the Azov Sea. No one could pass by without stopping, so people often took pictures with them. In autumn, they took photos next to the rust-colored “oak” chrysanthemums.
“They say the chestnut is Kyiv’s symbol. But I don’t see it here. Where is it? Mariupol, on the other hand, is full of chestnut trees. The Left Bank is all ash trees. They turned such a beautiful yellow. Their leaves fell in thick carpets. As kids, we’d gather them into piles and jump in,” Olena Suhak smiles. “And the acacias, too—filling the spring air with that intoxicating, warm-sweet scent.”
Tears streamed down her cheeks when, at a flea market in Kyiv, she found spoons identical to the ones they had at home in Mariupol. Four different ones, not a matching set, each with its own pattern. She returned to an apartment that wasn’t hers, to a kitchen that wasn’t hers, washed them, laid them out in front of her—and cried.
“Nothing has passed,” she says. “Every night, I wake up and try to figure out where I am.”
For a moment, it feels like she’s in her mother’s apartment. In a building that no longer exists.
Since July 2022, she has left Mariupol behind, had a brief stop in Zaporizhzhya, faced failed attempts to settle in Dnipro. Searching for housing for five people and four cats, only to hear, “No children, no pets, no elderly.” And then finally, Kyiv. The family has been here for more than two years now. The eldest daughter found a job, the younger son got into KPI. Life seems to be slowly falling into place.
“Kyiv is beautiful. It would be nice to rent an apartment with a view of the Dnipro, take walks, go on excursions. And then go back home. I still can’t get used to it,” Olena admits. “Everything here is so tall. In Mariupol, we only had one 14-story building in the whole city… Something keeps pulling me back, as if there’s a magnet there.”
Treasure
Memory plays cruel tricks.
She wanted to write about Karasivska Street. She started sorting through photos but couldn’t recall exactly where she had taken them. And yet, she was certain that if she were led to any house there, she would recognise it by touch alone—each one had its own unique stucco work.
Perhaps this forgetfulness is the most frightening thing. It’s like with a loved one who is no longer around—you fear that one day you might not remember their face. So you return to your memories, fixing each wrinkle in your mind once more.
Olena tells how her great-aunt was the first in her family to find her way to Mariupol, fleeing famine in her native Pereyaslav region. Later, Olena’s 16-year-old mother followed and stayed, building a family and giving birth to a daughter. On that very same Karasivska Street, which had once been home to Greek settlers from Karasubazar in Crimea—hence the name.
Fate then moved them from the right bank of the Kalchyk River to the left. Olena’s mother ended up living there for almost half a century, and Olena herself for 27 years.
“Everything here is familiar. Every mulberry tree at the old market, every apricot tree in the ravine and on Morskyy Boulevard. The ‘Lyapin Hills,’ the squares, the abandoned park. Everything.”
“Later, our family moved to Kuprin Street, on the outskirts of the city, near the highway to Zaporizhzhya and the road leading to the seaside villages. I worked in the Primorskyy district in the shipping industry, so that was my area, too. My husband even had an inheritance there—a house from 1890 in Novoselivka. In Slobidka, an old district that grew practically on the shoreline, I loved wandering around, admiring the local houses. I walked through the entire historic center of the city countless times.”
The routes she once walked so often, so routinely, now exist only in virtual photo albums. Her only portal home is her photo archive—the same one she carried with her throughout her time in the blockaded and later occupied city. Her Mariupol is there, like a wise old grandfather with his stories and fairy tales: press yourself against him, and you feel his strength.
Here, in one picture, is the cobblestone of Zemska Street and the pointed windows of Dr. Gamper’s red-brick neo-Gothic house, now cluttered with extensions by its new owners. The two-story Pobeda Cinema, before its reconstruction—the oldest in the city.
“I don’t go through my archives at all because three years have passed, and it hasn’t gotten any easier. I’m from Cheryomushky. Everything burned down in April 2022… Three generations lived there… Our family home, everything we owned… all gone. There’s nowhere to go back to, and there never will be (((.”
“But I open mine. I post about it. Mariupol has a rich history. I want people to remember,” Olena replies in the comments under a photo.
The wrought-iron lace of a canopy above a door, its shadow falling like a delicate web on the wall. Another house, built in 1899. And one from 1901. Soft curves and leaves, intricate lines—each canopy unique, like snowflakes.
“We had lacework like that, too. On my parents’ house.”
“Now nothing is left. Just ruins, homeless people, and stray dogs. The metal lace melted from shelling and fire.”
Through the golden chestnut leaves, still clinging to their branches, the elegant, almost toy-like red-and-white water tower gleams.
“My little feet walked this path so many times.”
“I loved this little paradise.”
Now, the same tower is covered in snow.
“Behind this tower is my home. I see my windows.”
The sun shimmers golden on the calm waters of the Sea of Azov.
“My sea—the warmest, the gentlest, the dearest… I miss it.”
A yellow house, like it’s wearing a giant triangular hat. Yellow old ash trees, yellow leaves on the ground, yellow curtains in someone’s window.
“My home… The balcony of my neighbour’s apartment. Any moment now, I’ll see her… I’ll run into Uncle Kolya, always fixing his old Zhiguli in the garage. Someone will step out of the entrance, we’ll chat))) Thank God everyone made it out alive. But the house is gone.”
The Bilosarayskyy lighthouse glows white against the blue sky.
“I have countless photos at home. From every trip… But a shell hit the room where my computer was.”
At the start of the full-scale invasion, when it still seemed impossible that it would last, and Mariupol still had electricity and internet, Olena transferred her photos to an external hard drive. She had received it just days earlier as a prize for winning a city photography competition. And when she filled it with gigabytes of Mariupol’s streets, buildings, and sea, she never let it out of her sight.
“I thought, just in case—if something happened, at least I’d have it with me,” she says.
Now, she shares her treasure. She uploads her archive—sometimes entire districts, sometimes streets, sometimes individual buildings—to the Facebook group Mariupol before the war. The cover note clarifies: By ‘before the war,’ we mean before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the destruction of our city. A friend, who shared her passion for Mariupol’s history, created the group.
“But he’s not a practitioner—he lacked photos. One day, he saw mine on my page,” Olena explains.
That’s how it all began.
In the comments under the photos, the shortest stories of the war are written.
“This is like air. I inhale your photos like I’m starving. Thank you for preserving all of this.”
Photography
Olena has been taking photographs for over 20 years. Her first film camera was a gift from her fiancé’s brother. But it was only with the arrival of a digital camera that the city came into her lens and captivated her. Photography naturally intertwined with historical research.
Once, for instance, during a tour of an old, abandoned cemetery, Olena took it upon herself to clean it up. She met a historian who was studying cemeteries, and soon others joined in.
— There were Greek burials there. But the Soviets buried people on top of them. We uncovered old gravestones, restored them, and put them back in place. We had someone who researched church records, and we began bringing back the names of our pioneers from oblivion. We dreamed of finding a Cossack cemetery, — Olena recalls.
A camera changes one’s perspective. At some point, you start paying more attention to the finer details — old handles, lanterns, stucco moldings, tiles, windows, the intricate patterns of wrought-iron balconies, the texture of old doors. Like the 110-year-old ones she photographed at 44 Fontanna Street.
Later, these photos would connect her with Mariupol native Yaroslav Fedorovskyy, who suggested restoring the doors. In 2021, the idea materialised into a community project called Doors’ Lives Matter. The team managed to restore two sets: the first—red doors on Fontanna Street, the second—blue ones on Semenyshyn Street. The third set was scheduled for installation on 5 March, 2022.
Olena would probably have photographed the celebration planned in their honor. Instead, she found herself a witness and participant in an entirely different story: she documented Mariupol in both joy and sorrow, even as Russian forces destroyed it and enemy checkpoints appeared on every corner.
— It had to be done so that no one would forget, — Olena says.
She keeps a bundle of pain in a folder titled The city that no longer exists. And of those doors, only one set has survived—the red ones, still standing against the scorched body of the building.
Planes
They sat in the hallway, holding each other, listening to the humming outside, which grew louder and louder. A plane was approaching. Then an explosion—something shattered and flew into the corridor. Silence. The humming again, another explosion. The balcony was destroyed, the kitchen windows blown out. A metal fragment pierced the windows, the cupboard, the door, and exited into the hallway. A few centimetres closer, and one of them wouldn’t have been there anymore. How could they believe this wasn’t just a terrible dream?
Shortly before the full-scale invasion, Olena and her husband were at their house on the Bilosarayska Spit. The sea was raging so violently that they had to pile up sandbags to shield themselves from the waves. A sense of unease loomed over them. Olena even suggested bringing the children and cats there: “We’ll wait it out, see how things go, and if everything’s fine, we’ll return.” “Why are you so worried? They’ll shoot a little and stop.”
In truth, no one took the threat too seriously. They had already been through this before. The real fear had been in 2014—back then, they had fled Mariupol to stay with relatives near Pereyaslav but quickly returned.
— It’s terrifying to admit, but we got used to war, — says Olena.
On 23 February, 2022, she was anticipating something—not something bad, but something pleasant. Someone had reached out, asking her to give a tour of Mariupol. The next day, when Russian missiles struck Ukrainian cities, they called each other:
— What do we do?
— Let’s reschedule the tour for next week.
— We didn’t believe it could last long, — Olena confesses. On 25 February, she even managed to celebrate her birthday.
And then—no connection, no electricity, no heating, no gas. Only small reserves of water. They collected rainwater, melted snow, sipped it sparingly, though at times they wanted to gulp down a whole bucket. For the first two weeks, they stayed in their apartment. But the planes forced them to seek shelter somewhere safer than a hallway with no solid walls.
The day the first Russian plane flew overhead, it knocked down all the power lines. The next one dropped a bomb in the neighbouring yard, then another in the next one over. After those air raids, the family finally decided to flee to Olena’s mother. A few days earlier, during a brief moment of relative calm, they had managed to visit her. At that time, things were still intact and somewhat peaceful there. They packed their four cats into two carriers and set off. The road had turned to sludge, houses all around were burning—some had lost entire floors, others had their entrances blown away.
— That day was horrific for our neighbourhood. People, vehicles, everything was mixed together. You run, the cats struggle to break free, something is flying overhead, something explodes nearby. You don’t know whether to drop to the ground or keep moving. You’re like a compressed spring, a bundle of sheer terror.
When they finally arrived, Olena’s mother was hiding in a storage room, and all the windows in her apartment were shattered. They managed to seal them up somehow and settled in—a narrow hallway, four people, four cats. The tension made it impossible to sleep, but eventually, exhaustion took over.
And then—the plane again.
Olena woke up to a crash and clattering. Something heavy fell on top of her. The force of the blast had blown the interior doors off their hinges, while the metal entrance door swung open as if it had simply been left unlocked. Three terrified cats bolted outside, while one remained frozen in place. They ran up and down the floors, entered open apartments, calling:
— Musya! Filya! Nyusha!
Only the sound of rushing footsteps and the frantic movements of people trying to escape responded.
At dawn, they set off back home. But the neighbouring building was on fire. The nine-story apartment block that once stood across the street—reduced to a single wall. Their own home had survived, though. People from the surrounding areas had begun gathering in its basement.
Thus began the life underground.
Ruin
For the next ten days, no one went outside. Mostly, they lay still to conserve energy and ration food: preserves, some biscuits, and sweets salvaged from the ruined wholesale market. That’s what kept them alive—pop a candy into your mouth, and the hunger would subside a little.
Olena’s mother, who remembered running after her father when he left for war in 1943, seemed paralysed. They had to beg her to at least drink and eat a little.
Later, when the days became quieter, they would venture out briefly to gather firewood, cook something. By early April, they were making trips to wells and even beyond the city to springs, standing in long lines for precious water.
But the first thing they did, as soon as they could, was search for their runaway cats. Olena showed pictures, asked people if they had seen them.
— They told me, “There’s some black-and-white cat in the basement, and a cat hiding in the corner.” I thought, “Those are mine!” A guy ran after the cat. Meanwhile, I was calling, “Musya, Musya.” And suddenly, she leapt into my arms, skin and bones, scruffy. And that guy was already dragging my Filya. I grabbed them, sobbing.
The youngest one was found a week later, a bit farther away on Myru Avenue.
— We got there, and there were destroyed vehicles, Russian tanks. So many dead people… And there, among the corpses, was our little one, climbing over them.
But now, at least, they were all together again.
Memory is a terrible thing. Sometimes, you wish you could forget certain things, but it’s impossible.
Volunteers from Donetsk brought the first water and bread—one loaf per person and a bottle of water. A queue formed, cameras recorded the people.
— Bastards… But that loaf, my God, it was so delicious. We hadn’t seen bread in over a month. We took it and ate the whole thing immediately. Because you can cook soup, but it’s just a name—some half-frozen potatoes and an onion. My son asked me then, “Mom, can I finish the soup?” Seventeen years old, always hungry.
The Mariupol garrison was still holding Azovstal, but occupation forces were already firmly in control of the city. Olena had just stood in line for humanitarian aid—bread, a tin of food, and water. It was a horrible feeling, accepting handouts from the enemy. Hearing gunfire in the air as they tried to push back the crowd of starving people pressing forward.
On the way home, she sat on a bench near the shattered PortCity mall. The man next to her was muttering something. She thought he was asking for a cigarette.
“I don’t smoke,” she replied without turning her head.
But he kept muttering.
— I looked at him, and his face was covered in soot, his eyebrows singed, his lips cracked, barely moving: “Water.” I gave him a bottle, some bread, a tin. Is he still alive?
They went to visit her husband’s aunt, who had been living nearby with her son, his wife, and their two children. But the entire section of the building had burned down, and they were nowhere to be found.
— With every body on the street, you lean in, look at the face, searching for your own.
I was crossing the road—it was an open area, I had to get through quickly. I saw a man running too. Something whistled past, just centimetres from my chest. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him drop, as if cut down. Just a second.
I was heading to see my cousin, but my aunt was there instead. She told me I would never embrace my cousin again. They had gone to board up the windows in their apartment, were crossing the street when the shooting started. My aunt managed to get through, but Vitalik fell, his arm torn off. She closed his eyes, tied his arm with a belt—to keep him whole. They were only able to bury him four days later.
One day, she and her husband dared to walk through the city.
“So many blackened, burned-out buildings, ruins—there is no old city anymore! Kuindzhi Street is in ruins. The Drama Theatre is gone! Myru Avenue… you could say it’s gone too. There’s nothing left—no city! The sidewalks and roads are littered with unexploded shells, mines, grenades. Damaged military vehicles stand around, and corpses… corpses of peaceful Mariupol residents everywhere. Horror, pure horror. I sobbed the entire way…” she would later write.
Departure
When these memories come crashing in like stormy waves, and the longing becomes unbearable, Olena goes to the water—either to Sonyachne Lake or Zhandarka. Just like she used to go to the sea, which always had a way of healing. She remembers greeting the sunrise at Bilosarayska Spit and watching the sunset over the estuaries.
“Blindfold me, take me there, and I’ll recognise the place by its scent.” In summer, the salty breath of the sea mixed with the fragrance of grass and the tangy aroma of drying estuary mud. By late summer, the mud would dry up, and glasswort would appear—first green, then turning red, forming vast crimson fields. They would gather its young shoots—boil them slightly, add garlic and tomatoes—and there you had a salad. They caught shrimp, collected mussels after storms.
During strong winds, sand piled into drifts right in their yard. Living by the sea was hard work. But in the end, life on the water’s edge was worth it. The sea didn’t just take—it sometimes brought gifts ashore. After storms, you could find almost anything: horseshoes, tin soldiers, an old copper stethoscope tube, teapots, lanterns. Olena had collected a whole trove and donated it all to the local history museum.
Bilosarayka was their lifeline, the one they clung to back in late April 2022 when, after the “cleansings”, Russian troops opened the city for entry and exit. A neighbor took advantage of the opportunity and drove around the nearby villages. That’s how Olena found out their house on the spit was still standing. There had been no fighting there—it had electricity, water, as if it existed on another planet.
When the shelling began, they had parked their car under the balconies behind the house, which saved it. The vehicle was pockmarked with shrapnel but was still running—though it drew unwanted attention.
“One day, I heard voices outside. It was Russians siphoning gas from cars. I started yelling: ‘What are you doing?!’ ‘What, is it yours?’ ‘Yes, it is.’ They left.”
After that, Olena’s husband and son removed the car’s wheels, and there it stood. But when they finally decided to flee to the spit, they found the fuel tank empty and the battery dead. That same neighbor helped again—he refueled the car and somehow found a generator. Everyone chipped in for fuel, taking turns charging their vehicles.
Two and a half hours instead of the usual thirty minutes, eight checkpoints—and they finally reached the shore. There was electricity, a chimney, gas, internet. That was where they learned Ukraine still existed.
“For the first time in two months, we could wash. The water ran black, our skin peeled off like fish scales. We shed it like snakes.”
For a while, they tried to regain some sense of normalcy, though it wasn’t easy. Azovstal was being bombarded relentlessly—from the air and the sea. The house trembled with every explosion, and cars marked with Z passed by on the road. Taking hidden paths to avoid checkpoints and the degrading filtration process, they managed to get their relatives out of Mariupol.
Despite everything, it still seemed possible to hold on—to wait for liberation. But one day, Russian soldiers came to their house, demanding documents from all adult family members. Then, at a checkpoint, when Olena’s son’s passport was checked, she heard: “Oh, almost 18. Time for the trenches.” That was their final warning—they couldn’t stay.
Friends who had already escaped to Dnipro helped them plan a route. The main challenge was getting past the Russian-controlled checkpoint in Vasylivka. That summer, the lines there stretched for miles—hundreds of cars. The Russians deliberately let only a few vehicles through each day, using civilians as human shields.
Olena’s family spent six days living in their car on the side of the highway. July. The car was baking hot, and inside were five people and four cats. Local volunteers saved them—bringing food, water, wet wipes. Ahead lay the final obstacle: baggage and device inspections.
Just in case, Olena had uploaded her entire photo archive to cloud storage and given access to a friend. A hard drive with photos of Mariupol—both before and after Russia’s destruction—was hidden under the car’s interior panels. Olena’s husband had dismantled the vehicle earlier to remove all the embedded shrapnel, giving them the perfect place to conceal the drive.
“Those photos also showed Russian military equipment moving through the spit and from the sea. I took the pictures from our balcony and sent them via Viber to a friend in Kyiv Region. He passed them on to where they needed to go.”
Before their escape, Olena deleted everything from her phone. But when her son heard that Russian troops were using special programs to check devices at the checkpoint, he decided to double-check her laptop.
“He opened a folder, and there it all was—the photos, the Viber messages, everything…”
At the checkpoint, they handed over their belongings for inspection. But the sun was setting, and the shift on duty didn’t want to bother with them. So, they were waved through—toward Zaporizhzhya.
“That’s how we got lucky.”
The story continues
In over two years in Kyiv, Olena’s photo archive has grown. Now it holds countless images of Kyiv’s streets, old and new buildings, doors, and nature. But through them, Mariupol still shines through.
“I want to go home. I understand that it’s not the same Mariupol anymore, and in my mind, I see crosses and makeshift cemeteries,” she says.
But what can you do when part of your soul remains in the city of Mary, and another part lingers by the sea on Bilosarayska Spit?
In Kyiv, Olena bought herself a second-hand full-frame camera.
“I have this dream that one day I’ll return to Mariupol and create a new photo story. Even though not much is left there. Only the sea.”
Almost every day, Olena uploads a new batch of photos to a group—images of her hometown as she remembers it. Each person finds something of their own in those pictures.
The wide-open gates of School No. 1’s old building—the former Mariyinska Women’s Gymnasium, founded in 1876.
“I worked there as a security guard for ten years before the war.”
“We were among the last to leave the shelter.”
“My school, which no longer exists…”
Trees cast long shadows over the inner courtyard of a house.
“The basement of this building sheltered us through those terrifying twenty days of March 2022.”
The unyielding face of a stone mascaron on the wall. The shaggy lion heads of the House with Lions, designed by architect Victor Nilsen.
“Such incredible photographs! Did we really just live there, with all this beauty around us?”
“We did.”
An album of nearly 150 photos of the Central District.
“Not perfect, but the best city in the world. It feels like I’ve been home again, I can almost smell that familiar May air—chestnuts and dandelions, fresh grass and the sea breeze.”
The number of photos keeps growing, and so do the comments.
And so, the story continues to live. As long as there are those to listen and those to tell it.
