A Landscape, Simplified

This is a long story, and it represents the sort of range that I want The Mortar to have. Solomiya magazine was launched shortly after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with the aim of showing the world an alternative picture of life in the country. We delivered their fourth issue to Stack subscribers in February 2025, and Iryna’s story stood out as my favourite. It’s simultaneously a roadtrip, and a field study of obscure flora, and a meditation on the nature of Ukrainian identity today, and it’s guaranteed to show you a fresh perspective of a country you might think you already know.

“Why don’t we go on a road trip?” I ask my dad as we finally overlap in Ukraine. I’m back for a while, having researched the history of monoculture farming in Ukraine from afar. He’s back, for good this time, having tried out life as a war refugee in Europe. It’s mid-July. The heatwave is at its peak, searing 38°C at noon. The car’s air conditioner is broken. Yet days after my proposal, we find ourselves on the road, North of my hometown, Kropyvnytskyi, in central Ukraine. We are searching for kurgany (Ukrainian for “kurgans”) – ancient burial mounds. At least I am searching for them, and my dad is happy to join me on the adventure.

Most are drawn to kurgany out of curiosity for what lies inside them, and from an archaeological point of view, there can be plenty: Scythian gold, vessels, Trypillya mugs, skeletons, tools, jewelry. But I am more interested in what’s on top of them, and the surrounding landscape they shape and belong to. 

Kurgany, if still intact, can be small islands of steppe plant species that survive amidst surrounding fields of vegetation. Most of the time the landscapes they inhabit are monotonous: a single-crop agriculture field, where their preservation often depends on the goodwill of a farmer who tends to them. I come home to Kirovohradshchyna (the Kirovohrad region) to photograph the plant communities that exist around mono-crop fields. I want to document what it's like to be a neighbor to fields of rapeseed, wheat, or maize, sharing the soil and the space. Ukrainian steppe areas have been shrinking as agricultural fields expand, but I want to see how their territorial disputes manifest spatially and what happens in the places where steppe and crop fields coexist. 

I anticipated feeling miserable, or at least sad when arriving at these steppe isles, but being there made me feel a joy similar to that of a sailor who first sees land after weeks on water. “Kurgan!” I shout, spotting the first one from the passenger seat. I am the shturman, the navigator, on this road trip, so my dad obliges and pulls over into the dusty road to drive up as close as we can. It is about 8 a.m., but the sun is up and scorching. I get my camera ready and a bag to gather some plants. 

While pacing around it, I can vaguely hear my dad describing the kurgan to someone on the phone: it’s big, maybe four or five meters high, and a couple of apricot trees are growing on both sides. I move closer to investigate: the apricots are sweet; it’s that perfect apricots-from-childhood level of sweet. The presence of shrubs and the maturity of the apricot trees reveal that the kurgan might have been vskrytyi, meaning “opened” in the jargon of those who are after kurgans’ insides – similar to the term “autopsied,” used by morgue workers when “opening up” a human body to determine the cause of death. Digging into the kurgan alters the soil composition, making it possible for trees like this apricot – which wouldn't normally sprout here – to grow. The kurgan’s treasures were most likely taken long ago. Still, the good news for those interested in what's on top of it is that the excavation probably happened at least a couple of decades ago, allowing the perennial grasses to grow in thick bushy bundles, and for the layers of vegetation to develop beneath them.

My climb uphill is prickly but rewarding. At the top, I find kovyla, or “stipa” in English, a signature steppe plant. It's soft to the touch and its bundles make beautiful waves when the wind blows. But I lack the knowledge to comprehend what I’m looking at – I’m no botanist and cannot distinguish which of the nearly 30 kovyla species found in Ukraine this one is. Their Ukrainian names are the most affectionate: kovyla naikrasyvisha (stipa the most beautiful; Latin: Stipa pulcherrima), kovyla poetychna (stipa the poetic; Latin: Stipa poetica), kovyla obludna (stipa the deceitful; Latin: Stipa fallacina), kovyla dyvna (stipa the weird; Latin: Stipa adoxa). Almost all of them – 28 species – are in the Red Book of Ukraine, an official list of endangered plants, animals, and fungi that should be legally protected. 

As we drive on, we meet Volodymyr, our future companion. Volodymyr is whom people in Ukraine call chornyi arheolog (literally “black archaeologist”), meaning that he spends part of his year digging into the kurgans – with a shovel – and the rest of the year selling or gifting what he finds. “Some big things I found there!” he shouts, as we struggle to hear each other over the power generator that roars outside of the cafe where we met. I barely catch the names of some former Ukrainian presidents, members of the political elite, and their sons to whom he sold the kurgan’s treasures. Typical clientele, hungry for Scythian artifacts, I suppose. I am not after Volodymyr’s knowledge of kurgans’ insides. Rather, I am after their locations, and advice on where to find those that have not been vskryty yet as these are the ones where I can find rare steppe habitats, not (heavily) touched by agriculture. Understandably, I come across as suspicious.

Volodymyr refuses coffee but stuffs his wooden pipe with tobacco and asks me why I’m interested in the kurgans. I give him my well-practiced spiel: “It’s the plants. I write about the land in Ukraine and want to explore what grows near agricultural fields.” Most people are content with this short version of the story. Plants, agriculture, land – all makes sense! But Volodymyr squints his eyes pensively. “Go on,” he nods and releases a cloud of intense tobacco smoke. I realize the stakes: either he decides I’m his competitor looking for treasures or, worse, an undercover state or police worker, which would make him shut down completely. I need to find the right words to explain why someone in their right mind would drive a few hundred kilometers in excruciating heat, dragging their father along to photograph plants. I tell him I write, but don’t believe the language alone can capture what is happening with land degradation in Ukraine. I explain that I brew my own photographic developers out of plants I collect to later develop my landscape photographs in the darkroom, and I tell him I worry that we are completely underestimating how bad the health of the soil is. I can see Volodymyr relax in his chair. He must be an artist himself, or at least someone with a sensibility to relate to an act that seems utterly nonsensical, borderline foolish to others. He asks me a few follow-up questions, but out of curiosity this time, rather than suspicion. “Why are we wasting time?” he smiles cheekily as he finishes smoking, and the three of us get in the car. 

As we drive through the rural landscape north of Kropyvnytskyi, the constant presence of crop fields outside our windows is no surprise. Numbers can never convey the full story, but they are important for grasping the scale of the issue at stake. According to the World Bank Group, arable land comprises the majority – 33 million hectares – of Ukraine’s territory. A small fraction is dedicated to growing berries and fruit trees, while an even smaller amount is used for cattle grazing. But most of it – 23 million hectares – is sown with agricultural and technical crops, such as wheat, sunflower, maize, rapeseed, and soy. For some areas, like the one we are driving through – the Kirovohrad region – nearly all of the region’s land is arable, forming a patchwork of oddly fitting rectangular pieces if seen from a satellite’s perspective.

“Take a left here!” Volodymyr commands, and we drive uphill, pulling over near a row of houses. We get out of the car – no kurgany in sight – but I follow my companion further uphill, passing yellow toadflax, known as Linaria vulgaris (льонок звичайний), and bush grass, known as Calamagrostis (куничник) along the path. Kurgans aren’t easy to find; their locations aren’t usually disclosed publicly, supposedly to protect them from illegal digging. Still, I managed to find an open-source map online with hundreds of pins marking where kurgans are supposed to be. I studied this map carefully while planning our road trip. Volodymyr, however, doesn’t need a map. Our first encounter as we reach the top of the hill is a large plastic sheet, used to cover a dig site overnight. But it’s been here for longer than a night. The folds in the material reflect sunlight and resemble the skin of an oily creature that lurks in the orange-brown dust. It’s pretty common to find a kurgan in such a state. On previous trips, I often arrived at what I had thought looked like a kurgan on the map, only to find a rubbish pile, a barely noticeable lump in a plowed field, or even a supermarket. 

As we walk further, I stumble upon a treasure – Astragalus dasyanthus (астрагал волохатоцвітий). Like most species of kovyla, it is also in the Red Book of Ukraine. I kneel to feel it with my hand: it's fuzzy and soft. It makes me smile. I found Astragalus dasyanthus in the middle of one of its two blooming cycles. It looks a bit withered now, but I know it will bloom again in a few weeks. 

A guilty pleasure this road trip allows, a harmless make-believe, as if it’s just another ordinary summer. We drive around, carefree, looking at plants, as if there isn't any war. We might even stop by the Dnipro to swim, indulging in a brief escape. What is this if not a perfect summer day? Even the soundscape plays along. The air raid sirens rarely reach us, and when they do, it’s a distant, faint echo – easily drowned out by the car radio. 

Astragalus dasyanthus is known for its healing abilities. Common in herbal medicine, it strengthens the immune system and aids blood coagulation, helping to reduce bleeding in case of an injury. As I make a photograph of it, a shadow falls from the top of the hill – a man in military uniform. Behind him is a machine gun stand, a portable air defense system (PPO) ready to shoot down the drones and missiles that Russia sends our way. “This is a military object, it’s prohibited for civilians to be here,” he informs us. Volodymyr reacts swiftly – I can tell he’s done this before. “Apologies, sir! We’ll be right out! She’s just interested in plants,” he says as if to diffuse any tension (because, really, what kind of threat does an interest in plants pose?). We stand there for a few seconds, contemplating one another and ending our interaction in the now all-too-familiar phrase: “berezhit sebe!” (take care of yourself). The suspension of disbelief, the ‘as if’, is shattered. The war is here, even on this remote kurgan, nestled alongside the medicinal steppe plant.

Having driven further north, making our way to what we hoped would be another kurgan, Volodymyr and I walked on the seam of the sunflower field and posadka, a windbreak. “Here a little fox was catching a little mouse, and here a little boar was passing by,” Volodymyr says, pointing to what looks like shallow, unintelligible burrows in the dusty path. Being able to tell who and what was here by the traces they leave behind proves to be a useful skill a few minutes further into the field. According to my map’s geotag and Volodymyr’s memory, we should be standing right in front of the kurgan. Instead, we can only infer it was here by a slight rise in the ground, a barely visible oval hump about 20 meters in diameter. We are both disappointed, though not surprised. The kurgan was plowed, and it, or what remains of it, is not the first one I will find amidst the rows of sunflowers in such condition. With the intensification of large-scale agriculture in the late Russian Empire and the early USSR’s "New Economic Policy," more of the steppes had to give way to arable land. Sunflowers, a staple mono-crop in Ukraine, have been planted here for over 100 years.

But the sunflower is not the only companion to the remains of the kurgan. As we wander back to the car, I stare at the windbreak. It hardly offers any more diversity than the field itself: it’s all primarily black locust, or Robinia pseudoacacia (акація біла). Ecologists in Ukraine have been advocating for its ban for decades. Native to North America, in Ukraine, the black locust is an invasive species because it suppresses the growth of other trees in its vicinity, quickly turning an area into a black-locust mono-forest. Local birds avoid nesting in its branches, migratory birds can’t feed on it in the winter, and its roots do not form connections with the fungi common in Ukraine. It seems to be a bad neighbor, all in all. The government eventually conceded and prohibited its use in forestry in 2023. 

Once laid to rest beneath the steppe grasses, those buried in kurgans now lie beneath a mono-crop – in this case, sunflowers. Centuries have passed since people were buried here, and with time, the kurgans have shifted from sites of grief and commemoration to mere landscape features. But staying true to their original purpose forces me to reckon with the kinds of landscapes in which humans are laid to rest.

“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.”

When I am dead, then bury me
In my beloved Ukraine
My tomb upon a grave mound high
Amid the spreading plain
So that the fields, the boundless steppes 
The Dnipro’s plunging shore
My eyes could see, my ears could hear
The mighty river roar
(Translated by John Weir)

These are the opening lines of Taras Shevchenko’s renowned 1845 poem Заповіт (Testament). “Коли умру я від кохання / То поховайте серед трав” (When I die of love / bury me amidst the grasses) echo the lyrics of a Ukrainian folk song, “В саду осіннім айстри білі” (White asters in the autumn garden). “Де ти хочеш бути похованим—там і твоя земля” (Where you want to be buried / is where your land is) writes Nadia Hlushkova in her 2022 poem, “Саме це тебе і спасе” (It is this that will save you). And this sentiment lives on even today. An artist I met in Lviv, who now serves on the frontline, once told me about the landscapes of the Kharkiv region, where he spends most of his days. “If it comes to it, I’d prefer to die under an oak tree,” he said, “but my comrades and I joke that, realistically, death will most probably find us somewhere in the windbreak lying under the acacias.”