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Two architects, the mayor, the mayor, the promoter and…
It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but this really happened. Exactly such an unusual lineup from Slovakia spent last weekend together in Ukraine.
Each of these five is also a member of the Bez ladu a skado group. They have long been making music only as a hobby and giving concerts sporadically, but now they have decided to play three special performances in Kyiv.
We couldn’t miss the opportunity to go there with them.
Bratislava – Trenčín – Košice – Lviv
“Where are you?” I ask Michal Kaščák over the phone. “We’re just going through Strilky,” he answers in a sleepy voice. It is before seven in the morning and we have just parked the car on the Ľviva bypass. From the map, we assume that we have enough time for breakfast before we move to the musician’s van.
We left in the early evening, because fellow photographer Vlado Šimíček had a discussion in Bratislava, and we drove nonstop through Poland. With no order or storage, they needed to pick up bassist Petr Kaščák in Košice, where he was at a medical congress, so they had to take a slower route through the Ukrainian Carpathians.
We have been in Ukraine for two hours so far. We had the longest break at the borders, which are closed between midnight and five during the curfew. “Curfew,” Vlado explains to me.
He knows the local specifics very well. While I have only been to Ukraine once so far, he was here for the first time as a photographer in 2004 during the Orange Revolution, a decade later he documented the events on the Maidan, and now he is a war photojournalist. From February 2022, he spent more than two months of clean time in Ukraine. As a journalist and as the main author of the idea of buying ambulances for Ukrainian front-line medics.
However, this maid is also special for him.
“I have never been