Dachne. How can you live in a Ukrainian village if everything is closed and ruined?

"My dear and guiltless land!

For what does the Lord punish you,

Punish you so hard?"

T. H. Shevchenko. Hosea. Ch. XIV.

Travelling around the corners of our country, meeting people, getting to know the history and the notable sights of towns and villages, you always see something moving that surprises and astonishes you. The Ukrainian people are famed for their industriousness and hospitality, for their rich traditions and centuries-old history. The nature of Ukraine has been sung by writers and painters. But most of our villages frighten you with their empty streets and abandoned houses. The infrastructure in the small settlements has been destroyed, there are no pharmacy points and no shops, the schools and kindergartens are closed. How unlike Ukrainian villages are to the European hamlets with their chalet-style villas.

The village of Dachne of the Mezhova district of Dnipropetrovsk region lies on the bank of the Vovcha river.

 

The village's single street, with the beautiful name Kalynova, is part of the T-04-28 motor road Dachne-Novopavlivka-Mezhova-Slovianka.

 

Dachne belongs to the Novopavlivka village council. To the administrative centre leads an 8-kilometre road of solid holes and potholes. The settlement probably got its name thanks to the dacha plots that were once situated here. Perhaps there was a children's dacha here, for nature the enchantress created every condition for rest and recovery.

The Vovcha becomes winding at this spot, with rapids, forming reaches and picking up the speed of its current.

 

The banks are edged with green masses of oaks, maples, ashes and poplars.

 

Flowering meadow herbs have covered the broad glades with a many-coloured carpet.

 

The gentle sandy descent into the water has been chosen by the cows for their watering place. Now there is silence and desolation in the village; of living souls I met only the cows on the glades.

 

The house of culture, the medical assistant's post and the kindergarten were probably built at one and the same time and served the villagers up to the beginning of the reforms with their optimisation and cuts. In these relatively young buildings of white silicate brick the panes are smashed and the approach to the yard is overgrown with weeds. The windows, needless to say, were smashed by the efforts of human hands.

The ruins of the shop

The closed kindergarten

The former medical assistant's post

The neglected house of culture

On the outskirts of the village only the ruins of farms and cowsheds remain. One has the feeling that the helmsmen of the local and regional administrations long ago washed their hands of Dachne and cannot wait for the day when it is struck off the register. The bus shelter was made in the same style as the other stops in the Mezhova district. You really have to dislike your own village to help it disappear from the face of the earth with such brutal force. Scheduled buses do not come here, and three pupils of the Novopavlivka school get from Dachne to their place of study by school bus. You can only imagine what it is like for the schoolchildren to travel every day along a road that has been beaten to death.

The abandoned cottages in their gone-wild orchards gape with broken windows and sagging roofs. The dwellings were put up for large families, but there is no one to live in them now; Ukrainians give their efforts not to the flowering of their native villages but to the economic development of neighbouring states.

 

Only the storks stay faithful to their long-settled places, repairing their nests after the winter, returning every year to their native parts.