Day Eight. The same poet. At the edge of Europe, above the river that flows to the ocean.
Lisbon, and the People Who Made It Home
I came to Lisbon twice, in the autumn of 2022 and again in the autumn of 2023, and both times the city gave me more than I had arrived expecting.
The first thing Lisbon gives you, arriving from Northern Europe or from Canada, is the light. It is not the light of Paris or Vienna or Prague, not the light of cities that have spent centuries under clouds. It is Atlantic light: wide, clear, white in the middle of the day and then gold in the late afternoon in a way that makes every surface, tile, stone, river water, the leaves of the olive trees on the hillsides, look as though it has been specifically prepared for your arrival. Lisbon is not a modest city about its own beauty. It knows what it has.
The second thing it gave me was people.
Christina, who hosted me in the best Airbnb I have had in years of European travel, not simply a room, but a welcome, the kind of hosting that turns a temporary address into a place you return to and feel recognized in. Fernando and Carlos, who became friends in the way that travel friendships sometimes form: quickly, genuinely, with the particular warmth of people who have chosen to live fully in the city they inhabit. And Roman, who had organized the weekly Saturday gatherings of the Ukrainian community in Lisbon, who ran the community website that served as the connective tissue of Ukrainian life in Portugal, who was doing quietly and persistently the work that diaspora communities require: someone who shows up every week, keeps the records, makes the calls, sends the messages, holds the space so that others have somewhere to come to.
I am grateful for all of them. Lisbon without these people would have been a beautiful city. With them, it was a home.
The Full-Scale Invasion and What November 2022 Meant
I need to be precise about the timing, because it matters.
I arrived in Lisbon in November 2022. This was eight months after February 24, 2022. Eight months after the full-scale invasion began. Eight months of Bucha, of Mariupol, of the strikes on Kyiv and Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia and the power grid and the civilian infrastructure. Eight months of our Saturday gatherings in Kamloops, every week without exception, standing near City Hall with the flag and the candles and the people who came back week after week because there was nowhere else to put the grief and the solidarity and the refusal to look away.
I was in Lisbon, in November, in a vyshyvanka, holding a Ukrainian flag. Not as performance. As the only way I know how to be Canadian-Ukrainian in a foreign city when the country is under bombardment: visibly, deliberately, carrying the colours into every place I go because someone has to, because the flag matters, because visibility is itself a kind of testimony.
I knew the monument was there. I had read about it, the Ukrainian community’s years of effort, the open competition, the Portuguese sculptor who had won by a single vote, the hill above the Tagus River chosen because it recalled the lines of Заповіт. I put on the vyshyvanka. I found the bus. I went.
The Hill Above the Tagus
The Belém district sits at the western edge of Lisbon, where the city reaches toward the river and the river reaches toward the ocean. The Tower of Belém stands at the water’s edge, the 16th-century fortress from which Portuguese navigators once departed into the Atlantic, carrying their maps and their certainties and their ambitions toward coasts they had not yet named. From the hill above, you can see the tower, the river, the far bank, and in November the particular silver-grey of the Tagus under Atlantic cloud and sun.
The Ukrainians who chose this location chose it with intention. The head of the Union of Ukrainians in Portugal, Pavlo Sadokha, said at the unveiling that this hill reminds him of Kaniv, the hill above the Dnipro where Shevchenko is buried, where the river bends below and the sky is enormous above. The similarity is not exact, but it is real: a hill, a river, a view that opens outward. The community found the lines of Заповіт written into the geography of a Portuguese park and they placed him there, where the poem had already prepared the ground.
The cobblestones around the base of the monument are laid in a pattern of Ukrainian embroidery, vyshyvanka in stone, underfoot, the traditional pattern pressed into the surface of a Lisbon hillside. An oak tree and a kalyna, the guelder rose, the Ukrainian national tree, grow nearby, planted to complete the landscape the community imagined. It is, in its quiet way, an act of extraordinary care. Not just a monument. A world built around the monument. A place that knows why it looks the way it does.
What the Pedestal Carries
I have been to many Shevchenko monuments in this series. Each pedestal says something different, makes a different choice about which words to give him in a foreign language, which image to offer a city that may not yet know his name.
Lisbon made a remarkable choice.
The pedestal carries Shevchenko’s signature — Т. Шевченко, in his own hand, cast into bronze. Beside it: Taras Shevchenko. Grande Poeta Ucraniano. 1814–1861. And then, on the adjacent face of the stone, cast in both Ukrainian and Portuguese, not a biographical fact, not a diplomatic statement, but the lines from Кавказ that are as close to a battle cry as Shevchenko ever wrote:
Борітеся — поборете, Вам Бог помагає! За вас правда, за вас слава, І воля святая!
And in Portuguese: Lutai! Combatei! Deus ajuda-vos! Convosco está a verdade, a glória e a sagrada liberdade.
Fight. Struggle. God is with you. Truth is with you. Glory is with you. And holy freedom.
The Ukrainian community in Portugal chose these words for their monument, out of everything Shevchenko wrote, out of all the verses they could have selected, and they chose the words that speak not about death or burial or the longing for a homeland but about resistance. About continuing. About the force that does not yield.
I stood before those words in November 2022, in a vyshyvanka, holding the flag, eight months into the full-scale invasion, and I thought: he knew. He always knew. He wrote these words in 1845, from a country under a different empire, about a people under a different siege, and they are as accurate in 2022 as they were then. The circumstances change. The words hold.
Заповіт, Above the Tagus
I recited Заповіт in full. Not just the opening verse that I often say at monuments, the burial on the hill, the wide fields, the Dnipro and its cliffs, but the whole poem, verse by verse, standing on the Lisbon hillside with the silver river visible between the olive trees and the Tower of Belém below.
Як умру, то поховайте Мене на могилі Серед степу широкого На Вкраїні милій, Щоб лани широкополі, І Дніпро, і кручі Було видно, було чути, Як реве ревучий.
Як понесе з України У синєє море Кров ворожу… отоді я І лани і гори — Все покину і полину До самого Бога Молитися… а до того Я не знаю Бога.
Поховайте та вставайте, Кайдани порвіте І вражою злою кров’ю Волю окропіте. І мене в сім’ї великій, В сім’ї вольній, новій, Не забудьте пом’янути Незлим тихим словом.
I had recited these words at monuments across many countries by this point in my life. But I do not think I had ever said the middle verse quite the way I said it in Lisbon, in November 2022. When it carries from Ukraine into the blue sea the blood of enemies, then I will leave the fields and the hills and fly up to God to pray. He is saying: not yet. Not until the war is done. Not until the chains are broken. Not until the people are free. Only then will he rest.
It was not poetry in that moment. It was a schedule.
What the Monument Is
The bust was created by Portuguese sculptor Elder de Carvalho, from the north of Portugal, who won an open international competition that included six Ukrainian sculptors, and won by a single vote. It is the only Shevchenko monument I know of made by a sculptor from the host country rather than from Ukraine or the Ukrainian diaspora. The Ukrainian community voted for the Portuguese artist, one vote in his favour, and in doing so said something about what it means to build a monument in a place you have chosen as home: you let the place participate. You let its artists speak. You make it a collaboration rather than a transplant.
The monument was unveiled on September 14, 2019, at Praça de Itália in the Belém district, before approximately 200 people: the Ukrainian community of Portugal and a delegation from Spain, diplomats, clergy of both the Greek Catholic and Orthodox churches, members of the Lisbon municipal council, and the Portuguese parliamentarian who had worked for years to make the space available, a woman with distant Ukrainian roots on her grandmother’s side, who had carried the memory of that connection into her political work and given it a hill above a river.
The activists who organized the project named their association Montarás — Monument to Taras Shevchenko, compressed into a single word that sounds, if you say it quickly in Portuguese, like a sentence: you will rise.
I find that beautiful. I think he would have too.
Roman, and the Saturday Gatherings
Before I went to the monument, and after I returned, there was Roman.
Every Saturday the Ukrainian community in Lisbon gathered, as Ukrainian communities were gathering in cities across the world in those months, because the solidarity required a body, a presence, a physical space where you could stand together and not be alone in what you were carrying. Roman organized those gatherings. He maintained the website that held the community’s news and events and resources. He did the invisible infrastructure work that makes visible community possible, the posts, the coordination, the showing up, the doing it again next week.
When I think about what the Lisbon Shevchenko monument means, I think about Roman. The monument is the permanent form of what the community is. Roman and the Saturday gatherings are the living form. Both are necessary. The bronze endures; the community meets again next week.
І мене в сім’ї великій, в сім’ї вольній, новій, не забудьте пом’янути незлим тихим словом.
And in this great family, in this free and new family, do not forget to remember me with a kind and quiet word.
The monument on the hill is the remembering. The Saturday gathering is the family.
He Was Already There
I took my photographs. The vyshyvanka, the flag, the bronze face above the inscription, the olive trees, the silver Tagus visible between the branches. The cobblestone embroidery underfoot. The words cast into stone in two languages, neither of them the language they were written in, both of them carrying the same meaning across the distance.
I said Слава Україні. November light fell across the hill. The Tower of Belém was small and white below, at the edge of the river that flows to the sea.
He was already there when I arrived. On his hill above the Tagus, in his vyshyvanka in stone, with his battle cry cast into bronze for Lisbon to read. He had arrived in 2019, three years before I did, placed there by a community that made varenyky and held auctions and raised seventeen and a half thousand euros, one contribution at a time, from Ukrainians across Portugal and Spain and the world.
He will be there when I go back. I will go back. Christina and Fernando and Carlos and Roman will be there. The Saturday gatherings will be meeting. The olive trees will be silver in the Atlantic light.
And on the hill above the Tagus, the words will still be there in Ukrainian and Portuguese, waiting for whoever needs to read them:
Борітеся — поборете.
Fight — and you will prevail.
He always knew.
——— 🇺🇦 ———
Few more cities. The same poet, looking back.
Слава Україні. 🇺🇦
About this monument: The bust of Taras Shevchenko in Lisbon stands at Praça de Itália in the Belém district (Restelo neighbourhood), on a hill with a view of the Tagus River, near the Tower of Belém. It was created by Portuguese sculptor Elder de Carvalho, winner of an international open competition that included six Ukrainian and one Portuguese entrant — the winner decided by a single vote. The pedestal carries Shevchenko’s signature and the inscription Taras Shevchenko — Grande Poeta Ucraniano — 1814–1861, alongside the lines from Кавказ in Ukrainian and Portuguese: Борітеся — поборете, Вам Бог помагає! За вас правда, за вас слава, І воля святая! / Lutai! Combatei! Deus ajuda-vos! Convosco está a verdade, a glória e a sagrada liberdade. The surrounding cobblestones are laid in a traditional Ukrainian embroidery pattern; an oak and a kalyna are planted nearby. The monument was inaugurated on September 14, 2019, before approximately 200 people, and is the first and only Shevchenko monument in Portugal. It was organized by the association Montarás (Associação Montaras – monumento a Taras Shevchenko), led by Olesia Zaruma, with the support of the Union of Ukrainians in Portugal and the Embassy of Ukraine in Portugal.
References
Kobza. (2019). У Лісабоні відкрили пам’ятник Шевченку. https://kobza.com.ua/ukrajina-svit/6065-u-lisaboni-vidkryly-pam-iatnyk-shevchenku.html
Nasze Słowo. (2019, September 22). В Лісабоні відкрили перший в Португалії пам’ятник Шевченкові. https://nasze-slowo.pl/v-lisaboni-vidkrili-pershij-v-portugali%D1%97-pamyatnik-shevchenkovi/
Novynarnia. (2019, September 14). У Португалії відкрили перший пам’ятник Тарасові Шевченку. https://novynarnia.com/2019/09/14/u-portugaliyi-vidkrili-pershiy-pam-yatnik-tarasovi-shevchenku-foto-video/
Shotam.info. (2019). У Португалії урочисто відкрили пам’ятник Тарасу Шевченку. https://shotam.info/u-portuhalii-urochysto-vidkryly-pam-iatnyk-tarasu-shevchenku/
Ukrinform. (2019, September 14). У Лісабоні відкрили пам’ятник Шевченку. https://www.ukrinform.ua/rubric-diaspora/2780248-u-lisaboni-vidkrili-pamatnik-sevcenku.html
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