What Kyiv Teaches the Body at Night
Something happened after midnight, and I want to sit beside you while my hallway, my grandmother and Kyiv reveal what survival can still really mean.
Vitayu, and hello to all the rather wonderful people who agreed last week to let Maisternia into their inboxes.
The workshop opened its doors on 27 July with its first article. I pressed publish, attempted to behave like a calm professional, and then checked the subscriber count with a frequency that no responsible architect would permit during a structural inspection.
Some of you came for architecture. Instead, you found me on a balcony during a Russian attack, accompanied by a kettle, several cigarettes and a refrigerator conducting a personal campaign against silence. You subscribed anyway, which I have chosen to interpret as encouragement rather than evidence that architects attract unusually tolerant readers.
For those who have only just stepped inside, I am Hryhorii Afanasiev, the architect behind Maisternia. I am writing from central Kyiv, where walls are expected to support ceilings, memories and, increasingly, the people trying to sleep beside them.
Much has happened since last Monday.
The day before the night I am about to describe, I had written a short piece of prose about Lukianivka.
In it, rain covered the ashes and ruins, lightning moved across the sky, and I flinched.
It was prose, not a weather report. On the night of 1 August, Kyiv was dry. The rain belonged to the page, but the unease behind it belonged entirely to me.
Lightning will never again be only lightning. Once, it meant a storm approaching home, a downpour against the windows and somebody remembering to unplug the computer. Now every flash must first pass through another possibility.
Weather has been forced to share its language with war.
Even thunder has lost its innocence.
At 1.32 in the morning, a message arrived from Lachen1.
“Loud in Kyiv.”
The name belonged to a real young man before it belonged to a Telegram channel. He created one of the channels many Ukrainians follow for rapid public updates during attacks.
People listen, observe and pass on what is happening around them. One person notices something. Another confirms it. A message travels, and thousands of telephones light up across the city.
During a bombardment, these channels become a nervous system built from people. A few words appear on a screen, and Kyiv understands that it should listen more carefully.
At 1.46/am, I carried the sofa cushions into the hallway and assembled my mattress again.
By now, the operation has acquired a certain efficiency. I would prefer not to become an expert in emergency upholstery, but war rarely consults us about our professional development.
I lay down and waited for my body to react to the explosions.
It did not.
There had been a time when an unexpected blast made every muscle contract. I had lived under occupation and awakened night after night to the flashes of Grad rockets. In Kramatorsk, I had watched ballistic missiles strike a building across the street in broad daylight. Last year in Kyiv, debris from a Shahed drone crashed into the flat opposite mine.
My body remembered all of it.
Usually, it remembered before I did. A sound arrived, and my shoulders rose. My chest tightened. My limbs prepared to move even when there was nowhere sensible to go.
That night, I merely opened my eyes.
My arms and legs felt like dead weight. The explosions continued, but I no longer had enough energy to flinch.
On my way home from work the previous evening, I had noticed myself shaking with every step through the metro. It was most visible in my legs.
Perhaps it was accumulated exhaustion. Perhaps it was the emotional weight of being let go from my job almost overnight and losing the draft deferment connected to it. Perhaps my immune system had simply had enough of my negotiations with reality.
I had also suffered an allergic reaction to new antidepressants. My psychiatrist and I had agreed that I should stop taking them, and I could feel the depressive phase gathering speed as the medication left my system.
Fear is often described as something sharp.
That night, it felt heavy.
At 1.54/am, the Kyiv authorities reported that an attack had caused a fire in a six-storey building in the Solomianskyi district.
At 2.03/am, Lachen sent another message.
“More ballistics.”
Beneath it appeared 418 angry faces, 51 crying faces, 17 likes and 7 broken hearts. Language had become too slow, so hundreds of people pressed the small symbols available to them.
At 2.13/am, another message reported that missile debris had struck a five-storey residential building. People were trapped, and a fire had broken out in its courtyard.
Two minutes later came another warning about ballistic missiles heading towards Kyiv.
When a residential building is struck, Russia bears responsibility for the attack. There is no architectural ambiguity about that.
Yet the architect in me cannot stop at the point of impact.
I begin asking what happened inside the building. Could people reach the stairs? Were the escape routes clear? Could rescuers enter the courtyard? Did the structure resist the fire for long enough? Had every requirement in our state building regulations been followed, or had somebody decided that a signature and an envelope were cheaper than safety?
These questions do not move responsibility from the missile to the building. They ask whether we did everything possible before the missile arrived.
An architect cannot prevent Russia from firing. An architect can still ask whether a building gives its residents the best possible chance of surviving what follows.
At 2.24/am, the city became quiet.
I sat on the mattress with my MacBook balanced before me. My hands hovered above the keyboard like those of a pianist waiting for the first note.
I thought of another keyboard.
In the video accompanying this note, I am playing a composition of my own. It does not yet have a title, and I make rather more mistakes than I would normally choose to preserve on the internet.
I have another recording in which the piece has reached its finished form. That version is cleaner. This one belongs more honestly to the moment. It hesitates, loses its footing and continues, rather like the person playing it.
This is one of the ways I cry.
When words fail and the weight of the world becomes too heavy, the piano gives my feelings somewhere to go. I am by no means a master of the instrument, but music creates a room in which my soul can speak without first explaining itself.
For a few minutes, the noise recedes. I can breathe, listen and allow the reality of what follows to take shape.
Thank you for listening, watching and reading. I had intended to begin this publication with architecture, but it has apparently acquired a soundtrack before a floor plan.
I found myself waiting for the next act of terror so that I could turn my thoughts into sentences.
Perhaps this is escapism. Perhaps it is a psychological practice I have invented to support myself. I only know that doing nothing while explosions move around the city is worse.
Writing gives the fear somewhere to go.
The anxieties that had occupied me during the day had suddenly become less urgent. I had lost my work and the security attached to it. I did not know what would happen next.
Yet at that moment, I wanted only to sleep.
Saturday was already waiting with a marathon of tasks and the possibility of seeing friends. If I did not rest, I would begin the next working week at half my usual capacity, while somebody would still expect a full day in return for my salary.
I admire the companies that understand what a night attack does to a person. Some allow employees to arrive at midday. Meetings are moved. A person sleeping in a beanbag chair at the office is not treated as though they spent the night dancing in a club.
There are managers who write in the middle of an attack to ask whether everybody is alive.
There are others whose unspoken instruction sounds rather different.
“Deal with the damage to your flat in your own time. Right now, I need you to meet the upholsterer and approve the fabric for my Italian sofa.”
I have nothing against Italian sofas. I would simply prefer them not to outrank the nervous systems of the people specifying their fabric.
Architecture cannot be humane if the profession producing it treats human beings as replaceable components.
At 2.42/am, I was still sitting on the hallway mattress, leaning forward with my elbows resting on my legs so that I could type.
My body began shaking.
The movement travelled through my chest, close to my heart, and along my arms. When I lifted my hands from my legs, the shaking eased. When I lowered them again, it returned.
At 2.46/am, I needed a cigarette.
I walked towards the balcony.
A few minutes earlier, Lachen had reported that two people had been killed in Pozniaky while trying to reach a shelter.
The building where they lived did not have one.
They died on the road, not because they had refused safety, but because their home had offered none.
The absence of accessible shelters inside residential buildings, and of mobile shelters close to them, has become one of Kyiv’s most serious failures.
In the fifth year of Russia’s full-scale war, this can no longer be dismissed as a temporary shortage or an administrative delay. In my view, the continued failure to provide mobile shelters near residential buildings amounts to deliberate inaction by the local authorities.
Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko carries particular responsibility for that failure.
Architecture cannot protect people when the city has failed to provide the space in which protection can begin.
Then the air raid alert ended.
It had lasted one hour and eighteen minutes.
At 2.50/am, I stood on the balcony and watched black smoke rising over Kyiv. I thought about the people who had not survived.
At nine each morning, Ukraine observes a national minute of silence.
Around that official moment, a grassroots initiative has grown to make remembrance visible in the streets. Its intention is understandable. It attempts to place the loss of fellow citizens within our shared daily life and prevent the dead from becoming another column of numbers.
But something changes when remembrance is enforced.
If you continue moving through the city during that minute, you may be stopped, confronted or treated as though movement itself proves an absence of grief.
I cannot accept that.
A minute of silence should create space for memory. It should not become another checkpoint.
No act of commemoration should be coercive.
Grief is too intimate, too complicated and too human to be measured by whether somebody stops walking at precisely nine in the morning.
My own minutes of silence arrive without permission and rarely according to schedule. They find me on balconies, in the metro, in cafés and in the middle of ordinary conversations.
That night, remembrance found me at 2.50 in the morning, with black smoke over Kyiv and a cigarette between my fingers.
At 2.52, another message arrived.
It said that people had not reached shelter in time. A body was lying in a courtyard while somebody continued trying to call the telephone beside it. Everything around them was burning.
I did not envy the person waiting for an answer.
I have been on that side of the silence.
I remembered friends who died under occupation. I remembered a three-year-old child dying slowly inside a car that had been fired upon by Russian soldiers, although white cloth had been tied to its door handles.
One cigarette was not enough.
Cars continued moving below me.
Life was still passing through the city, although I could no longer decide whether this was comforting or unbearable.
How many more nights will there be like this?
One day, I will tell you about living under occupation in 2014 and again in 2022. I kept a diary because I no longer trust memory to preserve events faithfully.
Memory is not an archive.
It changes the arrangement of things. It closes certain doors and leaves others permanently open.
I wanted to cry, but I could not.
Then I remembered the previous evening with my grandmother.
I had told her about my diagnosis of cyclothymia. She supported me. Only a few hours before the attack, I had told her that I loved her and that I was grateful she was in my life.
At 3.01, the tears arrived.
They burned as they ran down my cheeks.
In everyday Ukrainian, we call them “shchoky”. Literature gives us another word, “lanity”.
“Lanity” is softer. It sounds almost tender, as though language has placed a hand against the face before wiping away the tears.
To me, it sounds like balm for the heart.
That night, I needed such a word.
I had often told my other grandmother that I loved her.
The cruelty was not that the words had never been spoken. It was that, while she lay dying, we were no longer speaking.
At precisely the moment I needed to say them again, I had lost the chance.
She remained in occupied Donetsk2 and died in 2023 after her third heart attack. I could not say goodbye, attend her funeral or visit her grave.
Before her death, I had stopped speaking to her because our political arguments had become impossible.
Russian propaganda had occupied not only the city around her but part of the world inside her. This has happened to many older people who cannot easily check the information delivered to them through television.
Our telephone calls often ended in anger.
“If they said it on the news, it must be true.”
“Just wait a little and we will liberate you.”
The word liberation meant opposite things to us. She imagined liberation from the Ukrainian country she had been taught to fear. I imagined liberation from the Russian occupation surrounding her.
Russia had placed itself inside our conversations and made love difficult.
Yet she still visits me in dreams.
There is no television arguing between us there. There is no occupied city closing around her and no need to decide which version of reality may be spoken aloud.
She sets warm bread before me. The tea is sweet. Donetsk is home again.
I always wake too soon.
A tattoo on my body reminds me of her. It shows the hot sandwich she used to make when my sisters and I visited.
In my parents’ home, sausage and cheese were foods for special occasions. My grandmother knew we would arrive after church on Sundays, so she bought both. She put the sandwiches into the microwave and served them with sweet Princess Nuri tea.
I can still remember the warmth of the bread.
Her life had not been easy. She had Jewish roots that were hidden during the Soviet period by changing the form of the family surname.
Every branch of my family carries a different history of survival. One relative concealed Jewish ancestry. Another was forcibly resettled to Donetsk. One part of the family was dispossessed and lost its mill. Others survived the Holodomor3 while some did not.
During the Holodomor, my great-grandmother travelled along back roads to avoid checkpoints and reach relatives trapped inside a village held under a humanitarian blockade.
She brought the dying members of our family out by routes the authorities were not watching.
Her journey does not appear on a map, but every branch of my family that came afterwards depends upon it.
Without her, I would not exist.
I had the sandwich tattooed on my body on Holodomor Remembrance Day. I had just listened to Mozart’s Requiem at the National Opera of Ukraine.
I had not planned the symbolism, but bodies sometimes understand what the mind has not yet arranged.
The tattoo became a small manifesto.
No matter how difficult life becomes, there must always be bread. Not merely bread, but bread with cheese and sausage, because childhood teaches the body what abundance means long before an architect learns to measure a kitchen.
When my grandmother appears in my dreams, we laugh, embrace and eat those sandwiches together. Sometimes I wake and try to fall asleep again quickly, hoping I might return before she clears the table.
At 3.17, the air raid siren began again.
At 3.20, there were more explosions.
The hallway remained my bedroom. The sofa cushions remained my mattress. The MacBook waited beside me.
At 3.45, I broke down.
I lay there during the shelling, wiping my nose and allowing the tears to come. Then I took a photograph of myself.
I did not do it because grief is photogenic. I wanted a record that I was still alive and still capable of feeling something.
A photograph can become a witness when memory is exhausted.
At 3.52, I returned to the balcony after calming down.
My friend Bohdan had made a joke about what men think during another night of shelling.
First, they do everything possible to give their families a safe place during the alert. Only when everybody else is protected do they permit themselves one properly selfish thought.
Will there be enough room left for them to sprawl across the double bed?
Even during an attack, the mind eventually returns to spatial planning.
Afterwards, Bohdan said, there is still work in the morning. Money must be earned. Families must be supported.
That is Ukrainian resilience in one conversation. Protect everybody, make a joke about the sleeping arrangements, and remember that the bills have shown no interest in suspending hostilities.
At 3.54, the alert ended.
This time, the danger had lasted thirty-six minutes.
At 4.05, I was thinking about the people who had left occupied territories while their relatives remained behind.
I wanted to find an article explaining why we must continue speaking to those relatives, even when propaganda has changed their beliefs and every conversation feels like touching an open fracture.
Contact may be the last bridge that remains.
Territory cannot truly be liberated without the liberation of consciousness. If people living there no longer feel remembered, cared for or included in Ukrainian society, the arrival of another flag may feel to them like one occupation replacing another.
Architecture teaches us that a bridge must be maintained from both sides.
Human bridges are more difficult. They carry memory, anger, guilt and love, and there is no engineer available to certify their load.
Still, we must try not to let them collapse.
I smoked another cigarette on the balcony.
Dawn had begun to appear over Kyiv. The darkness thinned around the buildings, and the city slowly recovered its edges.
The soundtrack to the night was a Ukrainian song called “I’m Okay”.
The title has the optimism of an architectural completion date, which is to say that one should examine it more carefully.
The lyrics imagine a perfect dream in which cruelty has disappeared, lonely doors remain undisturbed, young people are not pursued by death and being human is still treated as an honour.
Then the song asks why honesty seems possible only in dreams while the waking world remains so merciless.
“I’m okay” is not reassurance. It is the lie the singer knowingly tells himself so that he can reach tomorrow.
Sometimes we say we are okay because explaining the truth would require more strength than we have left.
At 4.22, I photographed the morning sky.
I returned to the hallway, lay down on the sofa cushions and said good night to the dawn.
The piece of prose I had written the previous day returned to me.
In it, imagined rain covered the ashes of Lukianivka and lightning belonged to weather again. Outside, the real night had been dry. Now Kyiv was moving towards morning.
The city slowly recovered its edges.
Somewhere, telephones were still ringing.
Somewhere, bread was being cut for breakfast.
Since opening Maisternia, I have been thinking about what it means to invite people into a workshop while the workshop itself remains unfinished.
Perhaps this is the answer.
I cannot offer you architecture separated from bodies, families, work, memory and war. I can only show you the spaces in which these things meet.
Sometimes that space will be a city square or a carefully designed home.
Sometimes it will be a hallway at three in the morning.
Thank you for joining me here so early in Maisternia’s life. I hope you will return for the next note, where we will continue speaking about Kyiv, architecture, occupation, reconstruction and the ordinary objects that quietly hold our lives together.
If you would like to keep my spirits, and this workshop, alive, please consider a donation or a monthly subscription.
It reminds me that someone beyond Ukraine wants me to breathe, sip a coffee and keep stitching letters into words, and words into stories that need to be told.
Keep the Workshop Alive
Lachen is the surname of the young Ukrainian who founded and gave his name to the Telegram channel, which shares rapid public updates during Russian attacks.
Donetsk is a Ukrainian city that fell under Russian-backed occupation in 2014. Families were divided by checkpoints, propaganda and incompatible versions of reality. For Ukrainians whose relatives remained there, Donetsk is not merely territory on a map. It is home, memory and, sometimes, a final conversation in which love could not overcome the war.
The Holodomor was the man-made famine imposed on Ukraine by Stalin’s Soviet regime in 1932 and 1933. Millions died as food was confiscated, villages were sealed and survival itself was punished. For many Ukrainian families, its absence remains present at the table, where every piece of bread carries gratitude, memory and grief.