Here's a picture of my cousin Ivan and my then girlfriend Mo in Kiev in August 1994.
A story where fact is stranger than fiction..
My father lost contact with his family during WWII (when he was captured by the Germans) and never ever was in contact with anyone who knew anything about his family. In part he was petrified that the then Soviet state would exact retribution on his family if they knew he existed, in part it was close to impossible to gain any form of access in any way due to the Iron Curtain.
However in 1991, Ukraine became a free nation so there was a possiblity of doing something, but back then you couldn't even buy a map with the level of detail to try and work these things out..remember no real internet. By that time he was a poorly man and it wasn't clear how to even get to Ukraine at that time. He passed awi in 1994, knowing that his beloved homeland had become a free and independent state,
We had taken my father's ashes who had died earlier that year and took a plane to Kiev, and overnight train to Poltava (Around 350 km east of Kiev)...the next day we hired a taxi (an old Lada with holes through the floor that you could see the road through) and went north to try and find a place called 'Zinkiv' which we found referrred to in his UK identity papers.
We got there, and then I re-called him talking about his home village as something like 'Taraskov'..well the taxi driver asked some locals and sure enough there was a place Tarasakiv about 5 kms away.
So we went to this archetypal strip village (with his ashes in a casket in my rucksack)..we drove around for about 10 minutes and not knowing what was best to do..came to a small meadow with some trees and a stream running through it.
Very emotionally I sprinkled his ashes around the meadow and with this now redundant wooden casket pondered what to do about it.
So I decided to bury it in the stream under some stones..his name plaque uppermost.
I took a few pictures and saw on my final shots through the viewfinder a couple of Ukrainian babushkas (stereotypical grannies) sitting in the shade in a dacha some 200m away.
So we went back to Poltava and the next day a lady Svetlana that was a former cultural attache showed us around Poltava and explained a lot about the period of history from the second world war onwards.
We took the day train to Kiev the next day and checked into the Marriot (having sampled several Ukrainian national hotels we decided that running water in the bathroom was a good idea, but only if you could switch it off, even better)
At around 2am the hotel phone rang, Mo who suspected that we were going to be victims of a Russian gangster attack at any time asked me NOT to answer the phone.
I figured as this was western hotel I'd take the risk...a lady's voice stated that she was a croupier in the hotel's casino and she was in the lobby and had a man with her who alledged he was a relative of mine...
Mo was evem more convinced that this was the KGB/Russian mafia but we decided to go downstairs.
So on going downstairs found a very serious looking young man (circa 25) and an eqaully serious loking young lady.
Via the croupier he explained his name was Ivan, the woman was his wife Angela and he was a policeman based out of Zinkiv.
He had been called to an 'incident' reported by (it turns out) the Ulkrainian babushkas had called the police on seeing 'foreigners' ( looking back we might as well have been dressed in NASA space suits) doing something suspicous in the meadow.
He had gone to investigate and discovered the casket with 'Wasyl Bondar' engraved on a brass plate.
Ivan it turned out was the son of Petro Petrovitch whose mother was my father's sister. He recognised the Bondar name (slavic for barrel maker aka 'Cooper' and interestingly there are over 300 Bondar company director entries in the UK!) ) and put 2 and 2 together with the help of his Dad, Petro, whose dacha it turned ou was only about 400 m away from where we had laid my father's ashes..so he had truly come home!
Ivan decided to track the travelling spacemen!
Ukraine had only just become independent so the country was in a transistion stage, things were very much tired and broken after 50 years of soviet control and direction.
In the past we would have been tracked 24/7 by the Ukrainian KGB but these functions had collapsed..this presented a major issue as he couldn't use 'state apparatus' to try and find us.
There's a little confusion on the exact sequence but he was able to determine that we must have been staying in Poltava (at that time there was only one hotel in an area bigger than Nottiinghamshire that could be use by westerners)..so he visited the hotel, they confirmed the visit, in turn they explain we have just left, they don't know where to. They also explain that we had spent time with Svetlana, the cultural attache.
He in turn tracks down Svetlana who confirms everything and confirms we departed for Kiev on the train.
By this stage its late afternoon and he knows ( I think) that we are flying out of Kiev the next morning. So he gets into his very very battered Lada and drives the 350 km to Kiev a journey of about 6 or 7 hours at that time. He then systematically goes around every hotel in Kiev to try and find us..which eventually he did..
To say that I was suprised to see Ivan and his wife and to realise he was a relative and his pursuit to try and find us (when all had advised him it was too late and too difficult) was an understatement.
Ivan speaks no English and his wife very little so we had to rely on the very helpful croupier..we had a faltering conversation for a short while, agreed to see each other over breakfast and then sadly had to depart then to catch our early morning flight from Kiev.
So a new chapter in my family history had opened in a stange country called Ukraine that most people couldn't even point on a map too..at that time..
So fact is stanger than fiction, and Ivan's stubborn and tenacious tracking of us as we trundled across Ukraine is an embodiment of that country's people.. and that's why they will prevail in the longer term come what may in the short term.
Scottish Borders
