“And let it be painful to see each other”, says a line from Sophocles. It is Creon who speaks, and he evokes the bodies of those who remain unburied, for some alleged fault against the City – without honors, without tears, without mounds. Antigone opposes, she alone; she challenges the power she “enjoys among the advantages, / also that she can say and do what he wants”.
Only the pity of Antigone I can imagine, in front of these bodies. The earth and dust make its features almost unrecognizable. They are the village chief Olya Sutlilenko and three members of his family, found in a grave in the village of Motyzhyn, on the outskirts of Kiev.
And let it be painful to see each other,
says Sophocles’ verse – and gives voice to the sovereign who knows the weight of that humiliation. And Antigone defends unwritten laws, innate laws:
They are not of today, not of yesterday, they always live, no one knows when they appeared or from where.
They are the laws of human piety, which even this war ignores, brutalizes, cancels.