Land of my fathers

This is a painting. Here's the story.

Pre-occupied by the situation in Ukraine (and, almost as bad, the plight of Ukrainian refugees trying to enter the UK) I was scrolling through news from the area around Sumy and clicked  on the village of Lifino where my father was born. I've done this many times before, hoping to find something relevant to our family history but there's never been any information there apart from adminstative status, weather reports etc.

This time was different. I immediately spotted the family name in the search results. I brought up the page. There was my father's family home, the house where he was born in 1892. It was built by his grandfather. I have never seen it before, he had no pictures of it. The family left Russia in 1900 to live elsewhere in Europe, perhaps intending to go back but personal and political circumstances changed and after 1917 my father never could go back - he belonged to the old regime.

The photographs and information I found were on a travel blog set up by a young woman to provide independent travellers with interesting destinations in Ukraine that they would not otherwise discover: nature reserves, old mills, old manors - "ours" was one of those. The images and the description of the place mesh perfectly with the short memoir my father wrote about his early years there. 

Yes, the life style was feudal with peasants working for the  estate owner in return for their own subsistance on the land but, this being Ukraine, the conditions were nowhere as severe as elsewhere in Russia at the time and there was a strong Cossack influence in the area. The stories written by Nicolai Gogol about village life in Ukraine were spot-on in my father's opinion. The family were indeed privileged but liberal (thank goodness!) and anything but despotic: they had freed the serfs even before it became mandatory.

This image is a painting on the main house which was part of a complex of buildings: workshops, farm, dairy, laundry, store rooms, wine cellar etc. providing complete self-sufficiency for the community who lived and worked there. It appears that many of these buildings still remain, although derelict and succumbing to natural and human forces of decay and destruction. The place had recently been recognized as historically significant and plans were being hatched, perhaps, to salvage it but...

But now? Now what?  It doesn't look as if we'll be going to Ukraine any time soon. I have tried to make contact with the blogger, not only to tell her about our  connection with the place but to find out how she is faring and if there's anything we can do to help. It seems unlikely, given that the UK, out of all European countries, has put insurmountable hurdles in front of people seeking sanctuary here, but if there is a way to help, other than giving money, we want to do so. It goes without saying that people are more important than places and if the old manor has survived this long then that's a miracle in itself, whether or not it gets hit by a Russian shell.

Here's the blog article  about the estate
https://hghstories.com/en/homestead-chrush-lifino/