This is a fantastic conversation (roughly 90 minutes with questions) with Serhii Plokhy and Olia Hercules at the Ukrainian Institute London:
The Russo-Ukrainian War on Youtube
Plokhy is a historian and professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard; he’s written books including Gates of Europe, an excellent, readable introduction to Ukrainian history. Hercules is a culinary writer with a focus on her native Ukrainian cuisine; her book Summer Kitchens is just fantastic.
Both bring some incredible insight to the conversation, with such different perspectives on topics ranging from geostrategy and war to language. Just wish somebody had asked Olia a bit about whether the culinary landscape in Ukraine is changing in any way like the language use is!
The talk itself was recorded on 17 May, so a couple of weeks before russia blew up the dam - worth bearing in mind when hearing Olia talk about her family home in Kakhovka. Really powerful stuff.
(PS - not put the link in the URL field this time, let’s see what happens…)
This was great. Got the chance to watch/listen to it earlier today with @dana@lemmy.blahaj.zone
Glad you enjoyed it! They have a bunch of other videos on the channel that sound interesting, just not had the time to watch any of them.
@picard just so you know, I am able to access the link. First clicking on the post takes me to a lemmy post that I could not comment on as remarked on previously but I could access the video by clicking on the link in the post.
I however am not able to process video/audio so I did not listen to it and cannot comment on the content
@I_Like_Books @picard@lemmy.blahaj.zone Thank you for checking.
@picard@lemmy.blahaj.zone Thanks for sharing! I will have to have a listen sometime. I love Olia and her ‘Summer kitchens’. It’s a really beautiful cookbook and recipes are yum! I’m looking forward to checking this out.
@dana @picard@lemmy.blahaj.zone Sorry, it did not boost your reply to me.
I agree - Summer Kitchens is excellent. I really want to try to write a review some time. It was quite a revelation to me, Ukrainian cuisine - like, it really should be considered one of the top world cuisines. And the fact that not only is it not - but that almost nobody would even think there is such a thing in the first place - probably says quite a lot about the colonial silencing of the Ukrainian culture.
@dana @picard@lemmy.blahaj.zone I read elsewhere (like this article in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/28/chef-ievgen-klopotenko-putting-ukrainian-cuisine-back-on-the-map) how even Ukrainians tended to lose memory of their own culinary heritage during Soviet times, and there’s a big movement by people like Ievgen Klopotenko (https://klopotenko.com/en) to reintroduce stuff that was lost back into their culture (he also has a book coming out in English later this year which I’m really looking forward to!).
