Prehistory in Ukraine

Prehistory in Ukraine

di Alessandra de Nardis

This invitation to read is not a book but a short article published by the Florentine museum of prehistory on 26 February 2022; it talks to us about prehistory, about culture Tripolye which takes its name from the Ukrainian village Kiev governorate, a particular production of figurative art, indicative of a very high level of symbolic development; 10.000 anthropomorphic statuettes, produced within agricultural communities which largely represent female figures: women in slender and slender youthful forms, or in pregnant forms or as elderly women with small sagging breasts.

They are images linked to Life, to the great Mother Earth, to the Sacred.

How painful it is to note that in a moment in which the sense of the Sacred and the desire to care for Our Mother Earth seems to be reawakening, precisely in these places the devastating pantomime of war reopens.

Since ancient times, Ukraine has been a land desired by peoples and civilizations who have crossed it far and wide, making it a melting pot of life and death; it has undergone endless colonizations and various "protections" from those of the Roman Empire to the most recent ones; events that forced Ukraine to identify itself as a border land: the toponym Ukraine derives from the ancient Eastern Slavic u okraina, formed by u “near, near” e okraina, periphery, the Slavic root end “limit”, “edge”. Today it is once again the border between two worlds, that of peace and that of war.

The article is available in PDF from the Museum page itself:

PREHISTORY OF UKRAINE. TRIBUTE TO THE UKRAINIAN PEOPLE We dedicate this short text to the Ukrainian people and their history. The task of all of us is to be custodians of the memory, identity and past of peoples. And their freedom.

Alessandra de Nardis, February 2022

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