There was a large hill or rather a mountain. It was dusty and grey. Dressed in black, with a metal bucket in one hand and a mattock in the other, I was digging. Meticulously, I examined the pieces of rock that obstructed my mattock and caught my eye.

I am trying to understand when this journey began for me.

Was it when my grandfather, working in the Donetsk mine, discovered a fossil encased in coal?

Was it when I first saw the black eyes of the miners and thought of them as Egyptian pharaohs in disguise?

Was it when I left Donetsk in 2007, seeking a different life far from smoke and industrial dust?

Or did it start when it was lost, in 2014? The year when I was last at home and visited a coal slag heap, wearing a traditional Ukrainian wreath in anticipation that it was the last days of Ukrainian Donetsk?

Could it have started 300 million years ago when plants were giant and had shallow roots? Perhaps one of the fern plants from the Carboniferous period desperately wished to establish its roots. Is it their whisper that I hear in my dreams on the coal mountain?

Was it on one of Newcastle's streets or in the Mining Institute's archive room? Or while reading about George Orwell's rose garden in Wallington and his silent longing for beauty? 

These roses in Donbas were everywhere. They created a solemn atmosphere despite the omnipresent decadent scenery, filling the air with a bitter taste of abandonment and twisted hope.

Large and deep coal deposits in the Donetsk region were discovered by Welsh entrepreneur John James Hughes, who established the city as a centre of industry in 1869. It was known as Hughesovka, and many people from England, France and Belgium worked in mines and factories there. Then Joseph Stalin entered the stage, and to propagate the myth that such rapid industrialisation was achieved by communist hands, in 1924 the city was renamed Stalin - later, Stalino.

Strangely, the abundance of work did not foster a substantial movement or a strong identity for Donetsk. Unlike those plants in the Carboniferous period with their undeveloped roots, people from central and western Ukraine had a deep connection to their land. With fertile ground beneath their feet, they were not eager to work in heavy industry. The Ukrainian language disappeared from Donetsk schools. With Stalin's tyranny, in Ukrainian and Russian villages, many had to hide their own identities and work. Consequently, in the 1950s, Donetsk became a Mecca for those looking for black gold and a refuge for those needing to integrate into the Soviet system. Cultural differences burned away in the interminable factory heat, darkening the already grey streets with clouds of dust.

To find a new home meant to place your feet underground, as my grandfather did when he found himself in Donetsk, working as a miner. He was born in a Ukrainian village in the Belgorod region, and after serving in the Soviet army at the end of the '40s, he was seduced by his comrade's proposal: ‘Let's go to Donetsk’ afterward, ‘na volju’ [meaning ‘to a free land’, i.e. to Ukraine]. Isn't it strange, such a metaphor today? Now Donetsk is associated with occupation, captivity and danger - everything opposed to a ‘free land.'

Perhaps my grandfather's hands were involved in creating a 'terrikon', a slag heap near our Khrushchevka building. It was quite an old pile of coal by-products, a kind of tamed mountain that served us kids with a snow hill in wintertime and a place to play hide and seek in summer… 

I feel that I have hidden something very deep within that old slag heap, and I feel the urge to find it and get it back although I am unsure what it is exactly.

It feels like a fever; I am looking for something left behind perhaps when I did not exist; a trace of my soul, as if it were a fern plant imprinted in a rock, once so deep then excavated and torn apart. It is this question that keeps my memory in constant captivity, pushing me to solve the puzzle and reconnect with my past.

Or are they the roots of geopolitical conflict, fabricated by propaganda, akin to the excavation of coal from the bowels of the earth? Since the Russian language was never suppressed in Donetsk, I did not require Russia's protection.

It is sad that people don’t plant thorns like roses, which could protect them from this violently imposed act of imperialist ‘salvation’.

I wonder why the Soviets planted so many roses in Donetsk and called it 'the city of a million roses.' Was it to excuse the dystopia they wrought upon the land?

I wonder how do roses feel under Russian occupation? How do they bloom when Russian bombs destroy the streets of Eastern Ukraine, akin to how London suffered in the Nazi bombardments of the '40s? Or are roses just apolitical?

I wish I could see those roses of Donbas again. I remember visiting Soledar, a small town in the Donetsk region with a big salt mine. Even the outskirts were covered in roses. It was June 2021. Having lived up North, in Kyiv for over eight years, I had forgotten how hot June can be in my homeland. I had come to Soledar to organise a workshop for the local youth addressing the climate crisis. My aim was to inspire them to engage with environmental activism through art. They seemed inspired then, but I don’t know how they are these days. Even Soledar itself is no more. Did those roses survive? I wish to see their triumphant bloom next spring when, hopefully, we get this land back.

Now, in order to make something of this coal waste, I find myself in Chervonohrad, in the Lviv region, the westernmost part of Ukraine. It's hard to believe that I had to travel so far, 800 miles from Donetsk, to reach this coal waste.

I am unsure of what I should find here. Remnants of the black gold fever, once promising, that now wraps me in nostalgia. Yet, what I am looking for undoubtedly belongs to me.