4 days ago
With music festival honoring fallen combat medic, Ukrainians reinvent memorial culture
Editor's Note: The following is the latest in a series of reports by the Kyiv Independent about the memorialization of Ukraine's fallen soldiers.
"We weren't taught to live side-by-side with death in schools and universities, but it's always near," the speaker Anton Liahusha, the dean of the memory studies program in the Kyiv School of Economics, says during a lecture at the open-air Lviv folk museum.
On June 1, thousands of Ukrainians gathered to celebrate the 27th birthday of a fallen military medic and memorialization activist, Iryna 'Cheka' Tsybukh.
They listened to lectures about memorial culture in Ukraine, shopped for traditional and hand-made items, donated to the combat medic unit Tsybukh served in, Hospitallers, danced folk dances to live Ukrainian music, and sang Ukrainian songs around a bonfire.
Promoting the values Tsybukh cared for in life, the 'Cheka fest' festival is a striking example of the new ways Ukrainians are honoring those killed in Russia's war, as old commemoration customs fail to hold the weight of continuous losses.
The woman of the day was also at the festival as a large black-and-white portrait placed next to the stage. Tsybukh was killed during a front-line mission in Kharkiv Oblast in 2024 just days before her 26th birthday.
Before her death, Tsybukh was a fierce advocate for the reinvention of memorial practices in Ukraine, recording several interviews with Ukrainian media and widely sharing her views on social media.
The festival — named after Tsybukh's callsign and organized for the first time this year by her family, friends, and fellow activists — included both educational and musical programs.
How to love their loved ones after they were killed?
Before noon, hundreds of people had filled the lush green yard near one of the museum's traditional Ukrainian wooden architectural buildings.
People sat on the grass and chairs, while others that hadn't managed to get a seat lined the fence and gate. They listened to lectures about memorial culture that aimed to put the incomprehensible into words: How to love their loved ones after they were killed?
When the losses are so overwhelming, talking and remembering them together helped people share their weight, Tsybukh believed.
Her own family and comrades on the stage recounted stories of how she lived out her patriotic values, becoming a 'a moral compass' to many of the young people who didn't know her personally.
'Stories about Iryna inspire, give you the strength to move on,' said Kateryna Borysenko, 31, a psychotherapist in training who survived 1.5 years in occupation in her native Donetsk Oblast. 'They give hope that, however much the heavens would fall, we'll live on.'
'I have made it my duty to attend every event like this, connected with the war, with heroes, with soldiers,' said Khrystyna Martsiniak, 21, a journalism student studying at the same Lviv university that Tsybukh graduated from. 'I also was (at Iryna Tsybukh's grave) at 9 a.m. today. It was something special.'
The daily minute of silence at 9 a.m. to honor fallen soldiers was a staple of Tsybukh's memorial culture philosophy. She believed that if observed everywhere in the country, it had the power to unite Ukrainians in their shared loss.
'Stories about Iryna inspire, give you the strength to move on.'
Tsybukh's belief in unity in the face of loss was so deep she designed her own funeral as a sort of memorial concert to bring people together in mourning. In a posthumous letter published by her brother, she outlined her wishes for the funeral, which included a request people to wear traditional Ukrainian garments — embroidered shirts called 'vyshyvanka' — and sing ten Ukrainian songs around the fire in her memory.
The second musical part of the festival proved that Tsybukh's vision lives and expands, and is emerging as a new tradition. Thousands of people dressed in vyshyvankas covered the slope of a hill around the festival stage, where Ukrainian bands played the songs she loved. Hundreds danced as Tsybukh's family watched from afar.
When dusk fell, people approached the stage to honor Tsybukh the way she wished: by collectively singing in Ukrainian.
It seemed like the moment everyone was waiting for all day. From the stage, a short recording of Tsybukh's voice was played on a phone into the microphone.
'A most soulful evening awaits each of you tonight,' Tsybukh voice says from a recording taken during a concert she helped to organize for soldiers near the front.
Her voice and her legacy echoed again in many hearts, as ten Ukrainian songs from her list filled the evening museum park.
As the festival came to a close that evening, Tsybukh's friends and family promised to celebrate her birthday with a festival again next year. The remaining people gathered around the glowing embers of the fire to sing one last song — the Ukrainian national anthem.
Maria, 28, who declined to give her last name, didn't know Tsybukh personally but came from Kyiv specially for the memorial festival, said she left the event with a sense of duty fulfilled.
"I came here to see my beacon," she said, referring to Tsybukh, as she walked from the park through the dark streets with several other young women.
Read also: Memorializing Ukraine's fallen soldiers: One asked to be cremated so future fighters don't 'dig trenches in our bones'
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