Someone Hung Our Flag Before Ukraine Existed

In 1848, the people of Lviv walked into the square and found a blue and yellow flag hanging on the town hall.

Nobody knew who had put it there.

The Austrian authorities denied doing it. The Ukrainian council said they did not know either. The local newspaper recorded the confusion, no one knew who did it, but the flag remained above the city for almost a week.

Ukraine already existed in the language people spoke and in what they remembered, while it was still denied the right to exist as a state. There was no Ukrainian passport and no Ukrainian government.

There was only an unknown person who decided that those colors belonged above the city.

Whoever climbed up there eventually climbed back down. They went home. They continued with whatever an ordinary life looked like in Lviv in 1848.

They never learned that 178 years later, a man in Kyiv would be sitting at a computer thinking about them.

The country came later.

The flag was already there.

In Kyiv these days, blue and yellow is, of course, impossible to avoid.

It hangs from balconies and moves above cars. Nobody here has to explain why it is there.

It also covers coffins.

In every Ukrainian town there is a place where the flags are in the ground. Small ones, on thin sticks, one for each name. Somebody tapes photographs to some of them and the rain gets into the photographs. The field is larger than it was last summer.

So on the Day of the Flag, I could show you Ukraine covered in Ukrainian flags.

I would rather show you yours.

For years you have been sending them to me.

A flag in a window in a town where nobody else has one. A little blue and yellow pin on the coat you wear to work.

Sometimes it is a sticker on a car, sometimes you painted a stone and left it beside a path in a forest I could know only through your photograph.

And there are days when the colors of Ukraine find you by accident, in a field beneath a blue sky, and you realize that caring about a nation means noticing us even in places where you never expected to find us.

You send me photographs from places whose names I have never heard before, and I open them every night in Kyiv.

I want you to know that I keep them.

You may have hung that flag months ago and stopped noticing it when you walk past the window. You may have wondered whether such a small gesture still matters after so many years of war.

You may even have wondered whether anyone here would ever know.

I know.

I see your photographs, your houses and the streets where you live, with Ukrainian flags thousands of kilometres from Ukraine because one person decided to put one there.

I cannot properly explain what receiving those photographs does to me. There is a physical reaction first, almost like a hand pressing between my shoulder blades.

Because I know you did not have to do it.

Nobody in your town required that flag. There was no law asking you to place it in the window. No Ukrainian was standing beside you when you put it there.

You chose to make room for us in the place where you live. Four and a half years is a long time to keep a flag in a window for a country most of you have never been to.

Wars become familiar from far away. Headlines move elsewhere, and people learn new names and new disasters.

A flag that once made people stop can slowly become part of what they no longer notice.

And still, yours is there.

That is why I think again about that unknown person in Lviv.

We do not know their name, and we do not know what happened to them afterward. We only know that one morning the city looked up and the colors were there.

When you hang our flag somewhere far from Ukraine, you carry that same gesture forward.

You put the cloth where nobody ordered you to put it.

You make another human being look at it.

Someone may ask why.

And for one more day, Ukraine occupies a few inches of a window in a place where it could easily have disappeared.

Here in this article are some of the photographs you have sent me.

There are hundreds more, and someday I promise, I will place every single one of them together in a virtual exhibition.

They are documents of where this flag traveled during these years, and of the people who kept finding a place for it.

In 1848, someone climbed a building and left a blue and yellow cloth above the city.

Nobody asked them to.

Nobody asked you either.

—Viktor

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Thank you for giving me reasons to keep going through all these years, especially on the days when I had no idea where I was going.

Books by Lyubov and Viktor Kravchuk