Event – Nature, Memory, and Nation: the Dnipro Wetlands and Kakhovka Reservoir in the National Narrative

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Folklore Lunch: Nature, Memory, and Nation: the Dnipro Wetlands and Kakhovka Reservoir in the National Narrative

Presented by Anna Olenenko

November 22,  2024 | 12pm MST | Kule Folklore Centre | Edmonton

In 2023 the world was shaken by the news of the disruption of the Kakhovka HPP. It was called the largest environmental war crime since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This event found a wide response in Ukrainian society and revived the discussions about the reasonableness of the construction of the Kakhovka Reservoir in the 1950s, which flooded a historically, economically, and culturally important landscape – the Dnipro wetlands. In this paper, I argue that in the search for national identity the image of the Dnipro wetlands shrouded in Cossack legends and oral stories of the local population was resuscitated as a national symbol after gaining the independence, which has intensified after the destruction of the Kakhovka HPP and emerging the possibility to revive the Dnipro wetlands.

Anna Olenenko is a graduate student (Media and Cultural Studies) at the University of Alberta, a Regional Representative of Ukraine and member of Board of the European Society for Environmental History, a cofounder of the EnvHistUA Research Group. She graduated from Zaporizhzhia National University in 2007 and got her Candidate of Sciences in History degree from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 2013. Anna’s research interests are related to the environmental history of Ukraine, especially the Steppe region, and animal studies. The latest publication is a chapter (co-authored with Stefan Dorondel) “In Quest of Development: Territorialization and the Transformation of the Southern Ukrainian Wetlands, 1880–1960” in A New Ecological Order. Development and the Transformation of Nature in Eastern Europe. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022, pp. 65–86, and a chapter “Camels in European Russia: Exotic Farm Animals and Agricultural Knowledge” in Thinking Russia’s History Environmentally. Berghahn, 2023, pp. 151–173.

This is an in-person event, however, the presentation will be available on their Youtube channel and their website after the event.

Poster for Nature, Memory, and Nation: the Dnipro Wetlands and Kakhovka Reservoir in the National Narrative event
Feature Image: “Dnipro Basin River Town International” by Francis McLloyd (reworked by Numerius Negidius) is licensed under CC BY 2.5.

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