HE WAS ALREADY THERE

An Invitation to Continue

A Call to Shevchenko Voices Around the World

What Eleven Days Taught Me

Eleven cities. Eleven monuments. Eleven encounters with the same bronze face in eleven different languages, on eleven different pedestals, in eleven different versions of what it means to carry Ukraine into the world.

Kranj. Vienna. Washington. Bratislava. Zagreb. Prague. Paris. Lisbon. Kyiv. Lviv. Winnipeg.

From a Slovenian city park where he stands among the contemporaries of the national poet, to a library at the University of Vienna where a young bronze Shevchenko holds out an open book with both hands. From the Washington monument where fifty thousand people marched in 1964, to a hill above the Tagus River in Lisbon where a Portuguese sculptor won a competition by a single vote and cast the lines of Кавказ in bronze in two languages. From the courtyard of a Ukrainian church in Paris where Olga made the city legible for me in a lunch hour, to the grounds of the Manitoba Legislature where he sits with an open Kobzar on his knee and looks out across the prairie.

He was already there in every city I arrived in. He waited while I found my way to him: by tram, by train, by bus, by the particular navigation of a person who has read the address and is following it through an unfamiliar city. And each time I found him, I said Заповіт, quietly, into the air of a foreign place, and felt the particular thing you feel when Ukrainian lands in a city where it is unexpected: not relief, exactly, but recognition.

Eleven stories. But this is not the full picture. Not even close.

What I Could Not Visit

There are over 1,300 Shevchenko monuments in the world. More than 1,200 are in Ukraine. Over 100 stand in 35 countries outside Ukraine: in Argentina and Australia and Brazil and Georgia and Germany and Poland and Romania and the United Kingdom and the United States and dozens of other places where Ukrainian communities have put his face on a pedestal and said: here. He belongs here.

I have visited eleven of them.

I am one person, with one life, with the constraints that caregiving and teaching and the Saturday gatherings and the ten thousand things that fill a committed life impose on travel. I cannot go to all 1,300. I cannot collect all the stories. I cannot be in Buenos Aires and Athens and Toronto and Sydney and Warsaw in the same week, or even in the same year.

But you can help.

The Invitation

If you have stood before a Shevchenko monument, anywhere in the world, I am asking you to write your story and share it.

If you live in Kyiv and walk past the monument in Shevchenko Park on your way to work, and you remember what it looked like wrapped in sandbags in the spring of 2022, I want to hear that story. If you visited the monument in Kharkiv, or Chernivtsi, or Poltava, or Sumy, or any of the more than 1,200 places in Ukraine where he stands, write it down.

If you are in the diaspora, in any city in any country, and you found him there, in a park, on a university campus, outside a church, in a courtyard you didn’t expect, on a hill above a river, I want to hear that story too.

You do not need to be a writer. You do not need to be a scholar. You need only to have been somewhere and to remember what it felt like when you found him. The story already lives in you. I am asking you to put it on paper.

The Blueprint: How to Write Your Shevchenko Story

This is the form the series has used, adapted into a guide for anyone who wants to contribute. Think of it not as a template to fill in but as a set of questions to sit with until the answers come.

One: Where were you, and how did you get there? Every story in this series begins with arrival. How did you come to be in the city where you found the monument? What were you doing there? What was the city like when you arrived? What was the season, the weather, the quality of the light? The journey to the monument is part of the story. Don’t skip it.

Two: How did you find him? Did you know he was there before you arrived, or did you stumble upon him? Did someone take you to him? What was the neighbourhood, the street, the park? What surrounded him? The geography matters.

Three: What did the monument look like? Describe what you saw — the posture, the face, the gesture, the pedestal, the inscription, the material, the scale. Is he standing or seated? Young or old? What does the pedestal say, and in what language, and what did you feel when you read it?

Four: What do you know about the history? Every monument has a story behind it: who commissioned it, who made it, when it was unveiled, what obstacles had to be overcome, whose hands raised the money. The history is part of the gift.

Five: What did you recite? This is the most personal question, and the most important one. What came to you when you stood before him? What poem, what verse, what lines did you say into the air: quietly, not for anyone else, but because the moment required Ukrainian to be spoken in that place? For those who are not certain where to begin, begin with Заповіт.

Six: What did the monument mean to you, there, in that moment? Not what the monument means in general: what did this monument mean to you, at this moment, in this city? Were you alone or with someone? What had you been carrying that week? What did finding him there do to whatever you were carrying?

Two Parallel Rivers: Diaspora and Ukraine

This series has been written by a Ukrainian-Canadian who has been moving through the world for twenty years and finding Shevchenko in the places he passes through. It is, necessarily, a diaspora perspective: the outsider arriving in foreign cities, the recognition across distance.

But there is another story, or rather, more than a thousand other stories, that belongs to the people who live where the monuments stand. In Ukraine, Shevchenko is not a discovery. He is the fabric of the city, present from childhood, the destination of the March 9 walk, the place where protest gatherings begin and where flowers are placed on anniversaries too numerous to count.

Those stories are equally necessary and perhaps even more urgently needed now.

If you are in Ukraine, write your story now, while the cities are still standing. Write it as an act of documentation, of testimony, of the refusal to let the monuments and the memories and the ordinary Ukrainian life that surrounds them be erased or forgotten.

Two rivers, flowing from different sources, carrying the same water.

What to Send, and Where

If you would like to contribute a Shevchenko story, from anywhere in the world, from Ukraine or from the diaspora, about any monument you have visited, here is what to include:

The story itself: Written in the spirit of the series: personal, specific, grounded in the details of your particular encounter. Any length is welcome. Write in whatever language comes most naturally to you: Ukrainian, English, or both.

Photographs: If you have them.

Monument details: The location, the sculptor if known, the year of unveiling, any references you used.

Your name and connection: Who you are, where you live, and what brought you to the monument.

Share via DROKACADEMY, through the Stand with Ukraine community networks, through whatever channel connects you to this project. Tag the story with #HeWasAlreadyThere so that the contributions can find each other across platforms and languages and continents.

Every story is welcome. Every monument counts. Every voice adds to the picture that no single person can complete alone.

Why This Matters

I have been asked, more than once, why I do this. Why the monuments, why the poems said quietly into foreign air, why the photographs and the research and the writing.

The answer is simple, even if it takes a long time to say.

Because cultural memory is not preserved by institutions alone. It is preserved by the people who carry it with them into every city they pass through, who stop at the monument even when the schedule is tight, who recite the poem even when no one is listening, who write the story down even when they are not sure anyone will read it.

Shevchenko understood this. He wrote about it. He asked, from the steppe of Kazakhstan, to be remembered in the great free family with a kind and quiet word: not because he was certain the family would exist, but because he believed it should, and because writing the request was itself a way of willing it into being.

The monuments that stand in parks and plazas and university courtyards across the world are the diaspora’s answer to that request. They are the kind and quiet word, made permanent in bronze and granite, placed in cities that agreed to hold them.

The stories are the continuation of that answer. The living form of what the monuments hold in permanent form.

He was already there in every city I arrived in. He is already there in the cities you have visited, waiting for you to write the story of how you found him.

І мене в сім’ї великій,

В сім’ї вольній, новій,

Не забудьте пом’янути

Незлим тихим словом.

And in the great family, the free and new family, do not forget to remember me with a kind and quiet word.

We will not forget. We are building the record of the remembering.

Join us.

———   🇺🇦   ———

Слава Україні. 🇺🇦

The He Was Already There series was written by Dr. Oleksandr (Sasha) Kondrashov,

Associate Professor, School of Social Work and Human Service, Thompson Rivers University,

Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada.

Published on DROKACADEMY, March 9–19, 2026.

Monuments visited: Kranj (Slovenia) · Vienna (Austria) · Washington D.C. (USA) · Bratislava (Slovakia)

Zagreb (Croatia) · Prague (Czech Republic) · Paris (France) · Lisbon (Portugal) · Kyiv (Ukraine) · Lviv (Ukraine) · Winnipeg (Canada)