A group of elderly women in flower-patterned headscarves are preparing for departure at the Kyiv Boryspil Airport. Journalist and blogger Serhii Hryshyn posted this photo on Facebook a few days ago. “See, this is visa-free travel in action. Grannies are flying to Budapest,” he wrote. The photo has received almost 3,000 likes, caused hundreds of people to reflect on it on social networks, and has even been called the “photo of the century.”
It has turned out that the elderly women were soloists of the Berehynia (House Goddess) folk ensemble from the village of Kozatske, Chernihiv oblast. As reported by the TSN news service on its website, it was Hungarian musician Miklos Bot, known for collecting Ukrainian folklore, who had made them famous. The team was going to take part in a folk festival in Budapest.
Many social network users were moved by the photo, people wished the ensemble members to have a good time abroad, and some were pushed into serious thinking by it. For instance, journalist and musicologist Halyna Babii wrote on Facebook: “Why does everyone feel free to call them grandmas? The age has nothing to do with it. It is a case of social discrimination. In my humble opinion.”
Showman Dmytro Chekalkin shared his thoughts on a social network: “Such a photo was once captioned with a joke, which ran like ‘When a neighbor told me where in Europe cabbage was 20 kopecks cheaper...’ Meanwhile, I remembered how I had brought my 83-year-old grandmother Olena to live in Israel for six months in 1994. Admiring the paradise-like lives of Israeli pensioners in kibbutzim on the Mediterranean coast, she cried as she recalled the realities of Ukrainian collectivization, that is, the horrors of the Holodomor and political repression.”
There is an abyss between the realities of the 20th-century Europe and Ukraine. In the Soviet time, our people simply tried to survive and did not even dream about such pleasures as a trip abroad, a fine dress or a family trip to the restaurant... Therefore, The Day’s editor-in-chief Larysa Ivshyna commented on the “photo of the century” as follows: “How long they have been due this right which others take as a given! Instead of calling on people to ‘hide a grandma’s passport,’ they would do better to think of ways to open the world to such women!” It is a great idea, is not it? It is never too late to discover the world, and to do it hand in hand with one’s beloved grandchild is absolutely not scary.
