International Women’s Day 2022

Just a short one for once … Today is 8 March, Women’s Day. And this has to be marked in some way.

Last year on this date I gave you a post featuring various more or less gigantic female statues.

One of them was the humongous titanium-clad Rodina Mat (aka Motherland Monument) in Kyiv, featured in the photo above. The statue is a staggering 62m tall (with the sword), combined with the plinth she towers over the city at a height of over a 100m.

The photo was taken when I was in the city prior to my second Chernobyl trip in May 2015. Also on that occasion I took a photo whose composition now seems strikingly evocative:

Rodina Mat against big guns

This was of course only a play with perspective. The WWII-era guns in the foreground were of a perfectly regular size and formed part of the larger war memorial complex around the giant statue. But from this perspective she looks a) small, and b) threatened.

Suddenly that has taken on a fitting symbolism for the current situation in Putin’s war against Ukraine … and I wonder if this Rodina Mat will actually be physically threatened at some point as this nasty conflict drags on …

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