A Million Sour Cherry Orchards: Olia Hercules on Remembering the Ghosts of Ukraine

I am writing this story without knowing its end: it begins long before I was born and will continue long after I die. I am writing this story to help myself heal and to make you understand. I am writing the story of my ancestors, as well as my own story, which is a microcosm of the story of Ukraine, of its people and of the land itself, where I was born, where I was formed.

22 February 2022

Two days before Russia launched a full-scale invasion on Ukraine, I wrote this message to Putin in my diary:

You may be rattling your saber, but we have a million cloaked ghosts, standing at our shoulder, sharpening their scythes, waiting for you. You are right, our “traditions of statehood” have been limited, but despite that we have created a rich culture, a beautiful language and a strong, kind, inclusive and freedom-loving people. These are my ghosts. They may be dead, but their spirit is with me.

I could not sleep that week, suspended in a smudge state between awake and dreaming. This is when I saw the ghosts. They were cartoonish, monochrome with splashes of red, like in a graphic novel. That night, the wind was bashing against the loft window like an intruder, adding a soundtrack to my hallucination.

In my half-dream, the world looked apocalyptic. The specters stood on the edge of a trench, or a grave, it was hard to tell. There were millions of them.

They were skeletal, unrecognizable as humans, but I knew five of them well. They were three of my late grandparents: my mum’s parents Liusia, the family matriarch, and Viktor, gentle and quiet, holding in so much; and Vera, my paternal grandmother. There were also the eldest two of Mum’s five siblings: her brother Viktor, a font of family knowledge, and sister Zhenia, who was my primary school teacher and the first activist in the family.

Accompanying the ghosts were flashes of family memories. A crowd of us are at the long table under the walnut tree in Liusia’s garden, where we would gather for festivities and tell family stories. Sad tales of hunger, deportation, exile, return and silence, interwoven with stories of resilience, abundance, beauty, births and release. Epic narratives worthy of a novel, as well as anecdotes of the quiet everydayness of everyday things, both grounding and inspiring.

I was not asleep. I stretched for my diary and scribbled down the details of what I was seeing, “Like a chicken with her claw,” as my mum would say, hoping I would be able to decipher the words the next morning. The visions felt formidable and important.

The day that followed that night was particularly tough. Online, I saw a Russian tank in Kyiv driving over and flattening a car, with a person inside it. I found it so impossible to process what was happening in my homeland that I couldn’t self-regulate; I had something akin to a panic attack, convinced that the invaders would kill my mum and dad, overtaken by behaviors not my own. I kept shouting, in the kitchen, to my husband Joe, “I just want to be dead. Please, I just want to be dead.”

Eventually, exhausted, I went to bed. I thought of my ghosts, to calm myself. Then, in that semiconscious state, they appeared to me. A little less surreal this time, more human, like how they used to be.

My grandmother Vera came into focus before me. Vera’s biggest fear was war. I remember gatherings in her living room, one of the walls tiled and with a red rug hanging on it, a small window opposite, cosy and cavelike, the table heaped with plov, a Central Asian rice dish, and pelmeni dumplings, two of what we called her “greatest hits.” She would never fail to raise a toast to the absence of war. “The main thing is that there is no war.”

We would shake our heads at this dismissively; the idea of war was utterly inconceivable. Yet we dutifully repeated the words after her like a mantra and clinked our glasses in approval. Later, back at home, we would remark on Vera’s odd little ritual. “Have you noticed, she always says it like an incantation?”

I fell deeper into somnolence as my ancestors’ remains pulsed through the roots of the Earth, seeped through the capillary-like structures of mycelium, traveling from one end of Europe to the other, from underneath the wonky Ukrainian tombstones all the way to my garden table under the old pear tree in London. I find comfort in that, thinking of my connection with my ancestors and the way they live in me and my spaces.

I have always done this. In times of difficulty, I have never prayed to a crusty old man sitting on a cloud, instead I plead with my dead grandmothers in my head. I am sure I’m not the only Ukrainian—or human—who does this.

*

In 2014, when Russia invaded Eastern Ukraine and the Ukrainian autonomous Republic of Crimea in the south, I was already living in the U.K. I’d recently become a lone parent to my one-year-old son, Sasha—named for my brother—and embarked on an uncertain freelance career as a chef and food writer.

The invasion really scared me, like I’d never been scared before. Crimea was only seventy kilometers away from where my parents lived, in the Kherson region of Ukraine. They were in Kakhovka, right next to a reservoir that fed indispensable fresh water into the Crimean peninsula. How soon before the Russians moved into my hometown?

My anxiety was so debilitating that I realized—if I did not do something—I would struggle to manage my new and terrifying role as a single parent and freelancer. I decided to spend the last of that month’s money on my first ever trip to a psychiatrist. She was highly esteemed; it was the most expensive hour of my life.

To begin with, she asked me questions. Simple stuff, such as, “Do you smoke?” “How much do you drink?” “Where were you born?” When she asked me, “What is your religion, if any?” I blurted out, “My family!”

She raised her eyes at me slowly and then shot them back to the paper she was writing on. It must have sounded so utterly weird and even worrying; possibly cultish. I cringed for days afterwards, berating myself for not explaining further.

To me, a non-religious person, my family—including, maybe especially including, my deceased ancestors—has always been the most important, most sacred thing in the world. For Ukrainians, this spiritual devotion to our family and ancestors extends into our home, the temple.

Khata, a Ukrainian word with Persian origins which sounds a little bit like “hut,” roughly translates as “cottage.” It describes a small house in the countryside. To me, and to many Ukrainians, it evokes the bucolic, almost fantasy-like world of the nineteenth century, but of course the khata still exists today.

The original khata was a genius, highly sustainable creation, dreamt up in tandem with nature. It was often made of thatch and mud, especially in central and southern parts of Ukraine, and it was warm in winter and cool in summer. The walls were traditionally limewashed, apart from a black- or red-painted stripe that flowed along the bottom of either the outside or the inside walls.

This stripe was a symbolic separation: it divided the ancestral spirits who inhabited the “roots” of the house from the whitewashed walls above it, which symbolized life in the present. In the past, people would even be buried under the khata porch, endowing the doorway with an important spiritual and ritual significance.

The walls of a house, as well as its massive wood-fired masonry oven—called a pich—would be painted with ornate flowers and symbols, talismans that were believed to trap evil spirits and bad luck in their intricate, motley whorls. The pich was seen as an anthropomorphic mother figure, so revered that it was forbidden to swear in her presence. For me, as someone who cooks for a living far away from my homeland, the pich is yet another ghost of home.

There would always be a long bench by the windows in the khata, either embedded in the floor or mov-able, where women would sit and weave or embroider in winter months. Hand-embroidered—and often hand-woven—linen or hemp cloths called rushnyky would adorn the walls, often draped over icons or, later, photographs. The house would always be spotlessly clean: the intense spiritual and aesthetic commitment of Ukrainians to their homes requires meticulous order.

Fifty days after Orthodox Easter, it is believed the spirits of the dead come to life. Not all these are well-intentioned. Some will be your ancestors, but visitors can bring other spirits with them who might be less benign.

To ward off the troublesome ghosts, clay, well-rotted sweet manure and hay were mixed by foot and spread across the floor, a special, magical process that involved the young and the old. This was left to dry, firming up into a smooth surface, which was then covered with fragrant dried herbs, grasses and wildflowers (except for cornflowers, known as “mermaid flowers,” which represent more spirits of the dead, usually women who have died young).

Sedge grass, wild thyme, lovage, mint, lemon balm, flowering purple basil and wormwood mixed with sweet flag grass would cover the whole floor in a fragrant carpet, so every gentle step inside released heady essential oils, while branches of maple, walnut, birch or oak would be artfully arranged above door frames.

As long as the weather was clement, on the outside of khata walls, underneath the windows or by the fence, flowers bloomed. The twisted stars of periwinkles, towering hollyhocks with their hot-pink Medusa heads, the lion-mane frills of marigolds.

And, of course, giant sunflowers, one of many symbols of Ukraine, booming alongside the woven fence. Their heavy heads, the size of cartwheels, bowed down and facing towards the sun, from East to West. Their seeds entwined in neat galactic sequence, not quite black yet, but stripy grey, soft and slightly wet, nature’s treat for small children as well as birds.

What I call a “vegetable patch” was usually a huge field, facing a river to make watering it in the hotter months much easier. Rows of blowsy moss-green cabbages, their thick veins silvered with spider webs, the edges of their tougher outer leaves nibbled by slugs and snails. A row of beetroot, a fanfare of huge, juicy, red-streaked leaves.

And then the arresting sight of a pumpkin patch, apocalyptic spheres of swamp-green or orangeade, only good for cattle fodder, too unchallenging to grow, so not as interesting to cook with. (“She gave him a pumpkin,” Ukrainians will say of a woman who has turned down her suitor.) And, of course, here, there and everywhere, tall and spindly dill with its gold-tipped crowns, its royal presence felt in almost every savory Ukrainian dish. And then the orchard.

A vegetable patch and an orchard are burnt into our country’s DNA, indelibly part of our cultural identity. You will probably have heard of Chekhov’s Russian Cherry Orchard, but a sour cherry orchard right by a Ukrainian house is a huge part of how we Ukrainians perceive ourselves.

The image is crystalized in the public imagination by a poem called “A Cherry Orchard by the House” by Taras Shevchenko, poet and artist and forger of Ukrainian identity. (In 1847 he was exiled to the Urals for ten years, because he was part of the Kyrylo-Mefodiiv Brotherhood and his poetry was deemed “revolutionary.”)

The poem conjures up images of a family dinner being prepared, the orchard itself wrapped in the comforting hum of bees, the chattering of young girls. At night, by the light of the evening star, nightingales sing. This is the idyllic essence of Ukraine, the place we all go in our heads when things feel tough.

I think of my mother’s house. The house I grew up in only had three trees: the fast-growing walnut tree by the outside toilet and two cherry trees at the front, one planted for my brother and one for me.

I always resented that Sasha’s tree was healthy and sprightly, but mine, only a couple of meters away, was forever ill, its leaves curled in on themselves and its cherries filled with worms. Later, we moved into something bigger, where Mum could at last plant an orchard of her own.

I have a series of snapshots in my head where I walk through my mum’s orchard. The boozy windfall plums and unripe quinces with their felt cheeks. Leafy cherry trees, the fruit all gone, gobbled up by us and by the birds, and trees with ripening white and flat peaches. Other trees bearing hard little green apples.

When my son Sasha was little, we would visit every September. As I walked round the garden, I’d find that most of the apples hanging on the lower branches bore his teethmarks.

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From Strong Roots © 2025 by Olia Hercules. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.