Editor’s Note: Nov. 28 is the Holodomor Remembrance Day in Ukraine in 2020. On this day, Ukrainians are suggested to light a candle on their window at 4 p.m. in commemoration of the victims of the famine of 1932-1933.
Every year, on the fourth Saturday of November, Ukraine commemorates the victims of Holodomor, the mass famine of 1932-1933, imposed on Ukraine by the Soviet government.
Students of the Ukrainian Leadership Academy found a new way to tell the story of the Holodomor tragedy through the language of food.
They launched an online project that masks as a restaurant website. The “restaurant” is called Uncounted. The dishes on the menu are what Ukrainians ate during the famine to survive.
Among the menu items are Palyanichki (“Breads” in Ukrainian), made of baked and chopped potato waste with grain residues mixed in hot water. There is also “herbal bread” made of grated grass, kneaded in hot water, and “flatbread” made of oak bark and reed roots.
The menu of the online-restaurant Uncounted includes dishes that helped Ukrainians survive during the famine of 1932-33.
Next to every dish on the menu there is the button “check the price.” After pressing it, the website gives a reference to a specific family whose members died from famine.
“The price of this dish is the lives of the Berezenko family, whose descendants still live in the village of Sukholysy in the Kyiv region,” reads the description under the oak bark bread on the “menu.”
“The real value of each dish is the saved human lives, so these dishes are invaluable,” Sviatoslav Kelym Zolotaiko, 30, the head of the Department of Communication of Ukrainian Leadership Academy told the Kyiv Post. He is also the manager of the “Uncounted” project.
It took about four weeks to implement the project: creating a project concept, researching the“recipes,” developing the website, taking photos and launching the “online restaurant.”
The aim of the project is to spread knowledge about the Holodomor so that more people would learn about the crime of the Soviet government and so that more countries would recognize the Holodomor as genocide of the Ukrainian nation. As of 2020, most countries have not recognized the Holodomor as genocide of Ukrainians.
The website also offers visitors to sign a petition for the word “Holodomor” to be added to English dictionaries.
For the students of the Ukrainian Leadership Academy, it was also a way to pay tribute to their own grandparents who survived the Holodomor.
“My grandmother used to tell how the bark of an oak or a birch was ground with the root of quinoa or reeds, the stem of a dandelion or chamomile – and this is how they baked bread,” Ilona Kotovshchyk, a student at the Academy whose family survived the Holodomor in Kyiv Oblast, told the Kyiv Post. “When I was tearing off this bark with cold hands (for the Uncounted project), I was thinking: How did my grandmother, who had not eaten for several weeks, do it?”
“She taught me all my life not to throw away bread and not to play with food,” Kotovshchyk adds.
The online restaurant Uncounted is a continuation of the project “Uncounted Since 1932”, which the Ukrainian Leadership Academy created in cooperation with the communication agency Gres Todorchuk PR in 2017.
The project’s name is a tribute to the millions of Ukrainians who died during the Holodomor in 1932-1933. The exact death toll is still unknown due to the Soviet authorities’ cover-up of the crime.
For the past three years, students of the Academy have organized street pop-up restaurants with Holodomor “dishes” in seven cities across the country, as well as abroad, in Israel and Belgium.
The “Uncounted Since 1932” events were held in Tel Aviv and Brussels and received hundreds of mentions in the international media. For this, in November 2018, the campaign received three Effie Awards as one of the most successful communication campaigns in Ukraine.
This year, due to the quarantine restrictions, the event was replaced with the “online restaurant.”
A media project Ukraïner and the Holodomor Museum became partners of the “Uncounted.” They provided consultations and videos from their “Holodomor: A Mosaic of History” project, created with the support of the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation.
The project also encourages the signing of a petition to include the word “Holodomor” in all English dictionaries. People from the Canadian diaspora, who are active supporters of the Ukrainian Leadership Academy, have created this petition and asked the Academy community to share it in Ukraine.
Zolotaiko emphasizes the importance of talking about Holodomor in Ukraine and around the world.
“To return to our identity, it is not enough to talk about the Holodomor just one day a year,” Zolotaiko says. “Silence is not an option. It’s the same for society and an individual: when you keep silent about trauma, you’re not helping it.”
