In pictures: The nostalgia-fuelled traditions of Ukraine’s lost towns

In cities and towns across the mining regions of the former Soviet Union, the last Sunday in August is Miners’ Day, a municipal celebration to honour the hard work, courage and sacrifice of the area’s miners. The festivities involve street parties, music, funfairs, awards ceremonies, and lots of drinking. Christopher Nunn’s photographs from Miner’s Day celebrations in the town of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine, shot between 2015 and 2018, have now been collected in Krasik, a new photo book bringing together a poignant edit of his Miner’s Day photographs (published by Village Books).

The pictures affectionately depict a multigenerational community letting loose and, perhaps, letting their guard down a little. There are fairground rides overwhelmed by cheerfully recalcitrant children, foam parties charged with adolescent libido, pensioners with their best handbags, and candy floss of absurd, almost comedic proportions. A few miles away lies the frontline of a counter-revolutionary war, growing in ferocity. “It looks a little nostalgic,” Nunn reflects, “but it’s sort of accelerated nostalgia. Because these celebrations should still be going on.”

A rich seam of coal, the Donets Basin, extends west to east through most of the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces in eastern Ukraine, giving the area its portmanteau name, Donbas. Like in many mining regions, collieries became the social and civic nexus of these communities, influencing local traditions, cultural practices, and shared identity. Unlike in the mining regions in Britain, Donbas collieries were, until very recently, in commission and productive, with many generations of Ukrainian men employed in the pits. Hammer and pick tattoos appear frequently on the skin of the young men who strut and posture through Nunn’s photographs. It’s the same hammer and pick that features on the crest of local football club FC Shakhtar Donetsk, which was established in the 1930s as a mining volunteer sports society. “The tattoos were a connecting theme between the miners, Shakhtar Donetsk ‘ultras’, and even the military, as a lot of young men from these communities enlisted to defend Ukraine,” explains Nunn. “I’ll never know what happened to these men. Most of them are of fighting age.”

The Huddersfield-born Nunn has been working and travelling in Ukraine since 2013, after first visiting the country to learn more about his grandmother’s hometown of Kalush, in the country’s west. By the following year, he had moved east, drawn to the coal-mining regions along the border with Russia. Nunn has been present to document the huge scale of upheaval in the Donbas, both during the revolution, the regional war that followed, and the devastation of the Russian invasion. In March 2014, he found himself in the Donestk administration building as it was stormed by pro-Russian protestors, later to become the headquarters of the Donetsk People’s Republic. In April, after months of pro-Russian and anti-government unrest, Russian troops and Russian-backed militants seized control of a broad swath of the Donbas. To day, the region is bisected by the front line of a broader war which began after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. There are no longer Miner’s Day celebrations in Pokrovsk, which has been devastated. With the city mostly in ruins, very few civilians remain.

Despite Nunn’s proximity to the brutalities of war, his photographs have consistently focused on everyday life, domestic environments and the resilience of civilians. “The scale and complexity of the situation was very difficult to grasp, and the sensationalist media imagery that was often coming out of Ukraine wasn’t really something that I wanted to contribute to,” he tells me. “One thing I did know, though, is that there was always an underlying sense that life in Donbas was under threat.” Nunn’s determination to tell a different story about reality in the Donbas has come at a cost: in 2017, he was seriously injured in an artillery attack in the now-occupied city of Avdiivka, which left him with permanent damage to his vision. Undeterred, he has continued to make work which celebrates the small victories and stubborn dignities of daily life under occupation and attack, and the strange and dreamlike ways that some routines just carry on. 

After his injury, Nunn was taken at first to a hospital in Pokrovsk, and it’s a place he feels a deep connection to. What has happened to the city in the past year has been surreal and painful to witness. Krasik, a new book bringing together a poignant edit of Nunn’s Miner’s Day photographs from Pokrovsk, has recently been published by Village Books, and each sale will go towards fundraising for volunteers working to evacuate civilians from the besieged city. Krasik’s focus on both the children and teenagers of Pokrovsk on the one hand, and its more senior inhabitants on the other, is especially moving—the bittersweetness of childish glee and teenage love, alongside the solemn pride of a generation born under Stalin. In amongst the elation and abandon of the celebrations, there is a subtle sense of weariness, and the faintest hint of unease. Many of Nunn’s subjects seem to gaze beyond him diagonally, as if conscious of something undefined, just beyond the frame. The cover shows fireworks (a special dispensation, considering the wartime ban), but the smoke and sparks feel eerily prescient of the violence of the present day. “It was put together quickly, over just a few days. We didn’t want to overthink it,” Nunn explains. “Seeing what was going on in Pokrovsk, there was a sense of urgency. It doesn’t feel like the time for fancy coffee table books.”

Krasik is available here now from Village Books. All profits will be donated to volunteer groups evacuating civilians from Pokrovsk and the surrounding region.