Day Eleven. The final city. The city that made me Canadian.
Before Canada, There Was a Story About an Apartment
My Mama told me this story more than once, with the particular pleasure of a detail that turns out to matter.
The apartment where I was born in Lviv was previously inhabited by a family from Winnipeg, Canada. They came to the USSR and brought Canadian appliances that only my grandpa could fix, so when they were moving to Odesa, they let our family move in from the small apartment they had in Lviv. The geography of Ukrainian diaspora life is not always linear and the connections do not always move in one direction. What matters is this: before I ever arrived in Canada, before I knew what Winnipeg was or what Manitoba meant, the city had already touched the building where I entered the world.
I did not know then that I would spend twenty years and more growing toward that city. That I would arrive first in 2002 and then in 2004 as an MSW student at the University of Manitoba and find, in the prairie air and the wide flat light and the Ukrainian names on the streets and the institutions and the church windows, something I had not expected to find so far from home: a place that already knew what I was.
Winnipeg knew. It had been practicing for decades.
1999: The Meeting That Started Everything
The thread goes back to 1999, which is as far back as I can trace the Winnipeg connection by name rather than by story.
I was still in Ukraine. Brad, Dana, and Andriy came from Winnipeg as part of the CIDA-funded Reforming Social Services project, and we met. I did not know then that this meeting was the beginning of something. You rarely know, in the moment of beginning, what has started. What I knew was that they were kind, that they were from Winnipeg, and that Winnipeg, Friendly Manitoba, as the licence plates say, had produced people who were worth knowing.
More people followed. More meetings. More connections. Each one leading to the next, the way diaspora networks operate: not through grand design but through the accumulated hospitality of people who understand that a Ukrainian who arrives in their city deserves a welcome, because someone was once welcomed when they arrived.
By 2004, when I came to the University of Manitoba for my MSW, I was not arriving as a stranger. Winnipeg had been preparing for me for five years. The people were already there. The institution was there. The community was there.
And Shevchenko, of course, was already there.
The Legislative Building and the Poet Who Sits
He is not standing in Winnipeg.
Every other Shevchenko in this series has been a standing figure, or a bust, or a face in profile, the posture of proclamation, of address, of the man who has something to say and is saying it. The Washington Shevchenko strides forward. The Lviv Shevchenko gestures with a raised arm. The Prague Shevchenko holds out a scroll. The Paris Shevchenko looks forward and composed.
The Winnipeg Shevchenko sits.
He sits on a stone, in a coat that hangs loosely from his shoulders, with an open book resting on his knee. His gaze goes out into the distance, not down, not inward, but out, across the Legislative Building grounds and the city beyond, with the particular quality of someone who has been thinking for a long time and has not finished. On his knee is the Kobzar. His hands hold the pages without gripping them. He is in the middle of reading, or he has just stopped reading, or he is about to begin again.
It is the most intimate posture I have encountered in this entire pilgrimage. The seated figure does not command the space the way the standing figures do. He occupies it. He inhabits it. He is, in some essential way, at home; the way a person is at home when they have been somewhere long enough to stop performing their presence and simply be present.
He has been here since July 9, 1961. He was the first Shevchenko monument built outside Europe, the first one across the ocean. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker unveiled him before fifty thousand people gathered on the Legislative Building grounds: a crowd of nearly half a million Ukrainian Canadians sending fifty thousand of their number to stand in the prairie sun and watch a Canadian Prime Minister say, in his own words: if Shevchenko were alive to see this today, he would see the freedom that his people enjoy on this land. And he would think of the people on their native soil, who still do not have the right to freely determine their own fate.
He said that in 1961, with Ukraine still inside the Soviet Union. He was right about what Shevchenko would have thought.
At the ceremony’s end, the choir sang Заповіт. The diaspora newspapers reported that everyone wept.
The Man Who Made Him
I need to say something about Leo Mol before I say anything more about Winnipeg, because Leo Mol is the thread that connects this city to almost everything in this series.
Leónid Molodozhanyn, Leo Mol, was born in Poltava region in 1915. He trained in Leningrad, then in Vienna and Berlin and The Hague, moving through the dislocations of the twentieth century the way so many Ukrainians did: westward, under pressure, not entirely by choice. He came to Winnipeg in 1948, with his wife Margaret, and the city became their home.
He made the Washington Shevchenko, the striding young man that a hundred thousand people came to see in 1964, that the Soviet Embassy hated, that Leo Mol made here in Winnipeg and shipped to the American capital. I wrote about that monument as Day Three of this series, standing in the Washington dusk in 2007 with my imperfect silhouette photograph, thinking about how the sculptor who made that figure was my neighbour in the large sense, a resident of the same prairie city where I was reading books about diaspora in a university library.
He also made the Winnipeg Shevchenko. The seated figure at the Legislature, commissioned by the Ukrainian Canadian community, built between 1960 and 1961 with $175,000 raised from Ukrainians across Canada. And in Assiniboyne Park, in the Leo Mol Sculpture Garden that opened in 1992, the year the Lviv monument was unveiled on Prospekt Svobody, the year Ukraine turned one, there are more Shevchenkos: a standing figure, a Shevchenko with the Haidamakas composition, models and studies from a lifetime of returning to the same face.
Leo Mol died in 2009, at ninety-four, in Winnipeg. He is buried here. His garden is here. The city holds his life’s work in a park beside a river, in a pavilion and in the open air, available to anyone who wants to walk among the things he made.
I have been to that garden many times. I have stood before his smaller Shevchenkos in the pavilion window, the bronze figures on their pedestals with the autumn trees of Assiniboine Park visible behind the glass. The label reads: Taras Shevchenko, 1969. In the window-light of a Winnipeg October, looking at Leo Mol’s Shevchenko with Leo Mol’s garden behind him, I thought about what it means to spend a life making the same figure again and again, not from repetition but from devotion, from the understanding that some faces contain more than any single rendering can hold and that you keep returning to them because there is always more to say.
My Bus Route, and What It Passes
When I was a student at the University of Manitoba, and in the years since, when I have come back to visit, I have taken the bus to campus along the downtown route that passes the Legislative Building. The bus to Transcona did not go through downtown, but anytime I visited my bank or needed to come to Portage and Main and then go to the University, I saw Shevchenko.
The bus windows in Winnipeg in winter are fogged at the edges. The city outside is white and flat and enormous, the prairie sky pressing down on the streets, the cold making the air particular in a way you remember all your life. And through the fog of the window, as the bus passes the Legislative Building grounds, you can see him: Shevchenko on his stone, with his book, in his coat, looking out.
I have seen him from the bus in every season. In spring when the Legislative Building grounds turn green and the elms leaf out and the Ukrainian flag sometimes flies near the monument. In summer when tourists stop to photograph the golden Boy on the dome and happen upon a Ukrainian poet sitting nearby with an open book. In autumn with the prairie sky going orange and the trees burning. In winter with snow on his shoulders and his book, sitting out the cold the way prairie things sit out the cold, without drama, without complaint, simply enduring.
He is on my route. He is part of my geography of Winnipeg the way certain things become part of your geography of a city you love: not because you planned it but because the city put them in your path and they became, over years of passing, yours.
Shevchenko Ukrainian Centre, and Friendly Manitoba
Winnipeg is not the only Shevchenko address in Manitoba. This is something this province knows about itself, and that I have been discovering for twenty years.
Near Winnipeg, the Shevchenko Ukrainian Centre stands as one of those diaspora institutions that the Ukrainian-Canadian community has been building since the early twentieth century: a place that holds culture and memory and language and gathering, that exists because people decided it needed to exist and then made it exist through the ordinary labour of volunteers and fundraisers and people who showed up week after week because the institution required showing up.
And across Manitoba, if you look at the map with the right attention, you find Ukrainian names everywhere. Settlements that were homesteaded by Ukrainian families who came to the prairies a century ago and named the land for what they had left and what they carried. Dauphin. Vita. The fabric of a country that received a people and, over a century, was changed by them as surely as they were changed by it.
Any kind person I have met around the world, I have noticed, has some connection to Winnipeg. This is not a mystical observation. It is simply that Friendly Manitoba produces a particular kind of person: open, rooted, aware of what community requires and willing to provide it. My Canadian Mama is in Winnipeg. My Canadian family is in Winnipeg. My educational mentors are there. Many of my students have been there or come from there. The Kamloops community that stands with Ukraine every Saturday near City Hall is full of people with Manitoba connections.
Winnipeg is, in some essential sense, where Canadian me lives, the version of myself that Canada made, that the prairies and the university and the Ukrainian community and twenty years of building a life in a country that was not where I began have assembled into the person writing these words.
The Question Shevchenko Asked From Exile, Answered
In the Юродивий poem that was carved on the Washington monument pedestal, Shevchenko asked from his Kazakh exile: Коли ми діждемося Вашингтона з новим і праведним законом? When will we live to see Washington with his new and righteous law?
In Winnipeg, sitting before the Manitoba Legislature with an open Kobzar on his knee, I think he is already living the answer to that question, or one version of it. Not Washington exactly, but the prairie city that built him a monument before Washington did. The Ukrainian Canadians who raised $175,000 in the 1950s and put him on the grounds of the provincial parliament because they believed a Ukrainian poet had earned his place in the public life of a free country. The Prime Minister who unveiled him and said: he would see the freedom that his people enjoy on this land.
He can see it from where he sits. That is, I think, why he is seated rather than standing, not because he has stopped moving but because he has arrived somewhere. Not Ukraine, not the steppe, not Kaniv. But here, in this prairie city where Ukrainians came a century ago and built churches and schools and cultural centres and named their streets and kept their language and raised their children to know who they were; here, he sits and he reads and he looks out and he has found, if not the home he was buried toward, then one version of the family he asked not to be forgotten by.
І мене в сім’ї великій, в сім’ї вольній, новій, не забудьте пом’янути незлим тихим словом.
In the great family, the free and new family, do not forget to remember me with a kind and quiet word.
Winnipeg has not forgotten. Manitoba has not forgotten. The Saturday gatherings in Kamloops where I stand with the flag are attended by people who have not forgotten. The University of Manitoba, where I wrote my thesis about Ukrainian immigration, the research that became the question that became the twenty years of diaspora scholarship that became this series, has not forgotten.
And I have not forgotten. I will not forget.
This Is Not the End
I began this series on March 9, Shevchenko Day, in Kranj. I said: this week, one story per day. And the week became something longer, eleven cities, eleven encounters, eleven versions of the same recognition: he was already there.
But Winnipeg is where I leave this series, and I want to be honest about what that means. Winnipeg is not the end of Shevchenko. He is in more cities than this series has visited. He is in Buenos Aires, where the Lviv brothers cast the figure that stands on Prospekt Svobody. He is in Ottowa, in another Leo Mol figure unveiled in 2011. He is in cities I have not yet visited and encounters I have not yet had. There are more monuments. There will always be more.
And there will be more stories. I will keep exploring. I will keep arriving in cities and finding him there, already waiting. The series will continue, not this week, not in this sequence, but in the way that pilgrimage continues: not because you planned another journey but because you keep moving through the world and he keeps appearing in it.
The photographs I have from Winnipeg span different years and different seasons. The flag in the foreground, blue and yellow, with the seated bronze figure behind it and the Legislature dome behind that and the Manitoba sky behind everything. The sign at the Shevchenko Ukrainian Centre, with my face in sunglasses in a vyshyvanka, smiling because the name on the sign is the name that has organized my life and because this prairie city keeps offering me its own versions of the same recognition.
The small Shevchenko in the Leo Mol Sculpture Garden pavilion window, with the park visible behind the glass, the figure that Leo Mol made in 1969 in the city where he spent his life, with the same face he kept returning to because some faces contain more than any single rendering can hold.
Zapoвіт. Always Заповіт. In Winnipeg as in every city before it, in English-speaking Canada as in Slavic Europe and Atlantic Portugal and the summer garden in Paris. The words that have organized this entire series, the request that has outlasted every empire that tried to make it irrelevant:
Як умру, то поховайте Мене на могилі Серед степу широкого На Вкраїні милій…
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.
The great family, the free and new family.
Winnipeg is part of that family. Manitoba is part of that family. Kamloops, where I stand with the flag every Saturday, is part of that family. The Ukrainian community stretched across Canada and across the world, in Bratislava and Paris and Washington and Kranj, is that family.
He was already there when I arrived. He always is. He will be there in every city I have not yet visited, waiting on his stone with his open book, looking out across whatever prairie or river or boulevard the diaspora has given him, patient and certain and still in the middle of saying something that has not yet finished being said.
We will keep finding him. That is the point of the pilgrimage. Not arrival. Return. And return again.
Слава Україні. 🇺🇦
——— 🇺🇦 ———
This concludes the eleven-city Shevchenko pilgrimage series. But the pilgrimage continues. He is always already there.
About this monument: The Taras Shevchenko monument on the grounds of the Manitoba Legislative Building (450 Broadway, Winnipeg) was created by New York sculptor Andriy Daragan with the assistance of Winnipeg sculptor Roman Kowal, and was unveiled on July 9, 1961, by Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker before a crowd of approximately fifty thousand people. It was the first Shevchenko monument built outside Europe. The bronze figure depicts Shevchenko seated on a stone, holding an open Kobzar on his knee, gazing into the distance. The granite pedestal carries the name Taras Shevchenko and is decorated on three sides with bronze bas-reliefs: scenes from Haidamakas, Kateryna, and Nevil’nyk, and a central image of a bandura player singing to Cossacks. The monument cost $175,000, raised from the Ukrainian Canadian community. In 1998, a plaque was added commemorating Ukrainian Canadians and other Eastern Europeans unjustly interned as enemy aliens during Canada’s First World War internment operations (1914–1920). The Leo Mol Sculpture Garden in Assiniboine Park (opened 1992) holds additional Shevchenko figures by sculptor Leo Mol (Leonid Molodozhanyn, 1915–2009), who also created the Shevchenko monument in Washington, D.C. (1964), Ottawa (2011), and elsewhere. The Shevchenko Ukrainian Centre operates near Winnipeg as a community cultural institution. Manitoba is home to multiple Shevchenko monuments and sites, reflecting the deep Ukrainian roots of the province.
References
History.rayon.in.ua. (2023, July 9). У Канаді 62 роки тому відкрили перший за океаном пам’ятник Тарасу Шевченку. https://history.rayon.in.ua/news/614926-u-kanadi-62-roki-tomu-vidkrili-pershiy-za-okeanom-pamyatnyk-tarasu-shevchenku
Manitoba Historical Society. (n.d.). Historic Sites of Manitoba: Taras Shevchenko Monument (450 Broadway, Winnipeg). https://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/sites/shevchenko.shtml
Manitoba Historical Society. (n.d.). Historic Sites of Manitoba: Shevchenko Park / Taras Shevchenko Monument (Burrows Avenue, Winnipeg). https://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/sites/shevchenko2.shtml
Ukrainian Canadian Congress. (2021, July 10). 60 years since unveiling of Shevchenko Monument in Winnipeg. https://www.ucc.ca/2021/07/10/55627/
Ukrainian Institute of National Memory. (n.d.). 1961 — у Вінніпезі (Канада) відкрили перший за океаном пам’ятник Тарасу Шевченку. https://www.uinp.gov.ua/istorychnyy-kalendar/lypen/9/1961-u-vinnipezi-kanada-vidkryly-pershyy-za-okeanom-pamyatnyk-tarasu-shevchenku
Ukrainianchi. (n.d.). Leo Mol. https://ukrainianchi.com/leo-mol/
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