Infobae in Kiev: a quick wake behind another and a cemetery with no room for new graves

Sergei was forty-five years old and lived in Irpin. His daughter didn't want to watch him, and he asked him to leave. Sergei didn't want to, he said that was his city and he didn't plan to leave it. Resigned, Daria left her father and evacuated to Kiev. He lived weeks of anguish knowing what was going on in Irpin, the permanent bombing at first, the occupation later and urban combat. At one point, he lost communication.

Only after almost forty days of war, when Russian troops decided to leave the Kiev area (expelled by force of resistance), was Daria able to find her father. He was already dead. As he was able to rebuild his daughter, Sergei was on the street and met Russian soldiers who for some reason shot him. He died by bullets, not bombing. His body was left lying in the street, and it was only when Irpin Daria opened that he was able to recover it.

Now he cries, inconsolably, and asks that the wake be recorded and the story told. Two priests say their prayers while the family looks at the drawer. Sergei was made up and dressed in a suit, but there are still traces of wounds on his face. “Not much can be said in these circumstances. We only accompany the family and ask that this occupation end,” says the priest after the ceremony. He doesn't have much time to talk, as soon as Sergei's farewell ends, four people take out the drawer and another one immediately enters, the same happens with families.

The reasons for death are not distinguished in the Baikove cemetery in Kiev, one of the largest in the capital. None of the wakes, however, is followed by burial: only the bodies are cremated there because there is no room for more graves. It is one of the oldest cemeteries (it was inaugurated in 1831), and people mainly of the Catholic and Lutheran religion and the Orthodox church rest there.

His crematorium, the one that works the most in Kiev today, was built in 1975. It has a strange shape, like overlapping candles, a futuristic style that contrasts with the rest of the place. Next to it, a small hill from which smoke comes out. It seems to be the souls fleeing from the bowels of the earth. And all around, marble tombstones carved with vivid drawings of the people buried. They are not minimalist tombs, on the contrary, each of those who rest there has a version of itself engraved in the stone. Some are portrayed with the face they had at the time of death, others with an earlier version, their high hour.

In Baikove, former combatants of the Second World War coexist with those from the Donbas War, from 2014 to this part. The former fought alongside the Russians (strictly speaking, alongside the Soviet Union), to expel the Nazis from Ukraine. The latter did so against the Russians, also to expel them from the country. The asymmetry seems cruel to this people, who are trying to leave behind the dead of the war.

Right after Daria a young man enters the cemetery. He is visibly affected and says that he came to cremate his grandfather. When the war began, the young man went to Lviv to accompany his mother and sister, who were looking to leave the country. He returned to Kiev soon to look for his grandfather but he was late: he died from COVID. He didn't even get to fire him and now, he says, he must look after him only because the rest of the family has already left.

The work in the crematorium depends on the days. When they can, they try to do a complete ceremony for each deceased, but if too many families arrive during the day they must make summary farewells. Since the Russians left, work increased because bodies began to appear. Previously, soldiers were mostly watched, today civilian casualties.

The other emblematic cemetery in the city is Lukyanovskoye. It is next to the television tower that was attacked at the beginning of the war, and it is the place where many of the ceremonies take place in honor of those who fell in combat. There is no room to be buried there either, but the place is still considered a memorial to the Ukrainian army today. In fact, there is a whole military area created to bury soldiers. There, the tombstones have the same vivid drawings as in Baikove, but here you can see people dressed in uniforms carrying weapons, or wearing a pilot's suit or you can even see the planes flying.

The Ukrainians' link to death has too much to do with wars. Daria says she doesn't understand why that happens, if her father wasn't a military man, he shouldn't have died like that. “Rusky, rusky,” he says permanently in his attempt to make it clear who killed Sergei. “The Russians,” it means. “The Russians did it.” That's all he says as he walks to the car to accompany the van that will take his father's body to the crematorium.

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