Day Five. The same poet. The golden hour found him first.
The Night Train from Split
There is a particular quality to arriving somewhere by night train that no other form of travel replicates. You board in one world, surrender to motion and darkness and the rhythm of wheels on track, and when you wake, or when you give up on sleep and simply watch the countryside resolve itself out of the dark, you have become, without quite deciding to, somewhere else entirely.
I had come from Split. I will save Split for another time; it deserves its own telling, its Adriatic light and Diocletian’s palace and the particular feeling of walking through Roman walls to buy groceries. What matters here is the departure: a night train northward through Croatia, the coast giving way to hills giving way to the flat approaches of the capital, and then, in the early morning, Zagreb Glavni Kolodvor, the main railway station, rising out of the dark like the answer to a question you had been asking all night.
I had arrived. Now I needed tea, wi-fi, and several hours of the emails that academic life generates with mechanical faithfulness regardless of what country you happen to wake up in.
McDonald’s, Karlovačko, and the Particular Mercy of Wi-Fi
I am grateful for McDonald’s in a way that I suspect is not widely shared in academic circles. I have done significant intellectual work in McDonald’s restaurants across Europe, and I do not apologize for it. They are open early. They have wi-fi. They have tea. They do not expect you to buy something every twenty minutes or vacate your table when the rush arrives. For a traveller with a laptop and a queue of unanswered emails, this is not nothing. This is, in fact, a great deal.
What I did not anticipate about the Zagreb McDonald’s, arriving in the early morning hours after a night on a train, was the menu.
They serve beer.
Karlovačko lager, to be specific, a Croatian beer named after the city of Karlovac, clean and golden and decidedly not what I expected to find alongside the breakfast items. I have never had beer at seven in the morning in a McDonald’s. I have also never been in Croatia at seven in the morning after a night train from Split, and travel, I have found, has a way of creating firsts you did not know you were waiting for. I had the Karlovačko. It was, in the circumstances, exactly right.
I worked. Emails answered, documents reviewed, the administrative machinery of university life attended to from a table in downtown Zagreb with a tea and a Croatian lager and the particular satisfaction of a person who has solved the logistical problem of where to put several hours between a night train and a hotel check-in. By early afternoon, the inbox was manageable, the Airbnb near the station was ready, and I was ready for the city.
The Tram, and Where It Goes
My Airbnb was close to the Kolodvor. After checking in, leaving the bag, and reacquainting myself with the luxury of a room that was not moving, I did what I always do in a European city with a tram system: I found the tram.
Zagreb has good trams. Old ones, the kind with Lviv memory interiors and the particular squeal of metal on metal that means a city that has been doing this for a very long time. The tram system spreads across the city like a branching river, and one of its branches goes south across the Sava River into Novi Zagreb, New Zagreb, the large planned residential district built on the other side of the water.
That was where Shevchenko was waiting.
He was not in the historic centre, not in the old town with its cathedral and its stone streets and its Habsburg apartment buildings. He was in the residential city, the lived-in city, the neighbourhood of apartment blocks and parks and families. Specifically, he was in Travno, in Novi Zagreb-Istok, New Zagreb East, in a park at the intersection of two streets whose names I had been looking forward to reading in person for some time.
Ukrainska Street, and Why It Is Called That
The street names in Travno are not arbitrary.
Ukrainska ulica, Ukrainian Street, exists because of a moment in 1991 that Croatia has not forgotten and that Ukraine has reason to remember. When Croatia declared independence and was waiting to see which countries would recognize it, Ukraine was among the first, behind only the Holy See and Iceland and the Federal Republic of Germany. The neighbourhood named its streets accordingly: Ukrainska, Islandska, Vatikanska, the street that becomes Bundesrepublik Deutschland-Strasse. A geography of gratitude, encoded into the map of a residential district.
Shevchenko stands where Ukrainska meets Ulica Federativne Republike Njemačke.
When Mayor Bandić unveiled the monument on May 21, 2015, he said at the ceremony: I am pleased that we are here on Ukrainian Street, because in the autumn of 1991 Ukraine recognized us as one of the first countries after the Holy See, Iceland, and Germany. The monument to the Ukrainian poet stands, in other words, not only in a park but at the convergence of the memory of that recognition, a piece of geography that is already, before the sculptor’s contribution, a record of friendship.
Golden Hour, November, Red Leaves
I had not planned the light. The light was a gift.
November in Zagreb. The trees in the Travno park had held their colour: deep reds and burnt oranges and the particular rust that deciduous trees save for their last week before bare. The late afternoon sun was doing what the November sun does when it appears at all, arriving low and warm and golden, catching every surface at an angle that makes ordinary things luminous.
Shevchenko was luminous.
The bust is carved from grey granite, 2.2 metres of it, the work of Ukrainian sculptor Kostiantyn Dobrianskyi. This is the older face we know, the heavy brow, the full mustache, the composed and unwavering gaze. The same sculptor had made a monument to Ivan Franko in the Croatian city of Lipik four years earlier; Dobrianskyi knows something about giving Ukrainian poets permanent addresses in Croatian parks. The pedestal inscription is in Croatian: Taras Ševčenko, ukrajinski pjesnik, 1814–1861. Taras Shevchenko, Ukrainian poet. Simple. Sufficient.
In the golden afternoon light, with the red leaves in the foreground and the blue of the November sky behind, the monument was, there is no other word, gorgeous. I have arrived at Shevchenko monuments in rain, in dark, in the fluorescent light of indoor institutions. This was different. This was a portrait sitting that no one had arranged, the landscape offering itself as a frame without being asked.
I took my photographs. And then I did what I always do.
Думи мої, записані
There is a thing I do at Shevchenko monuments: I recite something. Not loudly, not for anyone else. A private habit, part ritual, part prayer, part the simple need to hear Ukrainian in the air of a foreign city.
In Zagreb, with the golden light on the bronze face and the red leaves burning in the foreground, I said Заповіт, as I always do:
Як умру, то поховайте Мене на могилі Серед степу широкого На Вкраїні милій…
And then I said the poem that had come to me in Bratislava as well, the one that asks the question about why the words stay when the wind could so easily have scattered them:
Думи мої, думи мої, Лихо мені з вами! Нащо стали на папері Сумними рядами? Чом вас вітер не розвіяв В степу, як пилину? Чом вас люди не забули, Як свою дитину?
And this time I recorded it.
I do not entirely know why this was the time. Perhaps the light. Perhaps it was simply that a Ukrainian-Canadian was standing in a Croatian park named for the friendship between two countries, in autumn, in the gold of a November afternoon, and the moment asked to be kept in more than one form.
The words hung in the park air. Then a tram went by somewhere in the distance, and ordinary life resumed.
What the Monument Chose
The 2015 unveiling was not the original plan. The monument had been conceived for March 2014, to mark the bicentennial of Shevchenko’s birth, but 2014, as every Ukrainian knows, was not a year for celebrations. The Maidan. The annexation of Crimea. The beginning of a war that would not end. The unveiling was postponed.
It happened instead in May 2015, on a rainy afternoon that did not, according to accounts, empty the park of people. Hundreds came: representatives of Ukrainian and Rusyn organizations from Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Slovenia; diplomatic missions; civic leaders. The representative of the Ukrainian community, Boris Hraliuk, said at the ceremony that what they were witnessing was the realization of a hundred years of longing, one hundred years of a Ukrainian community in Croatia that had been waiting for this.
One hundred years of a dream. Standing in a park in November, in a city that had named a street for Ukraine because of what friendship means across a decade and a century and more.
Back Through the Residential City
I stayed longer than I had planned. The light was changing, the gold going rose going blue, and each change made the red leaves do something different against the sky, and I kept taking photographs because the moment kept being beautiful, which is the problem with golden hour: you cannot trust it to stop being worth watching until the dark arrives.
Eventually, I walked back to the tram. Through Travno, past the apartment blocks and the trees and the ordinary evening of a residential neighbourhood going about its ordinary business. I found the line that would carry me back across the Sava, back to the old city, back to the Airbnb near the Kolodvor.
On the tram, I looked at the photographs on my phone. Shevchenko in the red leaves. Shevchenko in the golden light. My own face in the selfie, looking slightly surprised by the beauty of it all, the way you look in photographs taken when something exceeds what you were prepared for.
I had come to Zagreb by night train from Split. I had worked the morning in a McDonald’s with a beer I had not expected. I had done the emails that the university requires regardless of country. I had taken a tram into the residential city and found, in a park named for the shape of a friendship, a Ukrainian poet standing in November gold.
He was already there when I arrived. He always is.
——— 🇺🇦 ———
More this week. Each day, a different city. The same poet, looking back.
Слава Україні. 🇺🇦
About this monument: The monument to Taras Shevchenko in Zagreb, Croatia, is a granite bust 2.2 metres tall, created by Ukrainian sculptor Kostiantyn Dobrianskyi, a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine who also created the monument to Ivan Franko in Lipik, Croatia (2011). It stands in the Travno neighbourhood of Novi Zagreb-Istok, in a park at the intersection of Ukrainska ulica and Ulica Federativne Republike Njemačke. The pedestal bears the inscription in Croatian: Taras Ševčenko, ukrajinski pjesnik, 1814–1861. The monument was unveiled on May 21, 2015, in the presence of Zagreb Mayor Milan Bandić, Ambassador of Ukraine to Croatia Oleksandr Levchenko, former Croatian President Stjepan Mesić, and representatives of Ukrainian and Rusyn organizations across the region. It was erected by the Ukrainian Community of the Republic of Croatia with the support of the Embassy of Ukraine, as a sign of the long-standing friendship between Croatia and Ukraine. The street on which it stands takes its name from Ukraine’s early recognition of Croatian independence in 1991.
References
Behance. (n.d.). Monument to Taras Shevchenko, Zagreb, Croatia, 2015. Kostiantyn Dobrianskyi. https://www.behance.net/gallery/74181939/Monument-to-Taras-Shevchenko
Ipress.ua. (2013, November 7). У Загребі з’явиться пам’ятник Шевченку. https://ipress.ua/news/u_zagrebi_zyavytsya_pamyatnyk_shevchenku_32530.html
Ruwiki. (n.d.). Памятник Шевченко (Загреб). https://ru.ruwiki.ru/wiki/Памятник_Шевченко_(Загреб)
Wikipedia. (2025, January 27). Пам’ятник Тарасові Шевченку (Загреб). https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Пам’ятник_Тарасові_Шевченку_(Загреб)
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