The community of Nazareth is a community centre for IDPs, mutilated soldiers, and drug addicts located on the outskirts of Drohobych in Ukraine and managed by Caritas Spes.

This structure is a former secret military base of the Soviet Union and, although it was destroyed before being abandoned, it still bears the scars and has become a Ukrainian symbol of redemption and resilience.

This symbol is even stronger given the nature of the conflict shaking Ukraine, becoming a metaphor for the will to create a Ukrainian identity on the ruins of the old Russian world.

Here, you meet a world of completely different people united only by the war, a context that puts everyone on the same level. The stories mix and intertwine in a sad (and perhaps utopian) search for a return to normality.

This project aims to tell the daily lives of its inhabitants and those who work there, representing the immense suffering and resilience manifested in the heaviest of ways: the wait.

A wait that symbolizes the entire feeling of the country, a generation of Ukrainians devastated by human and material losses, but clinging to the hope of a return to normality and to national identity as a form of daily struggle.

Since I arrived 6 months ago in the community, I was very surprised by the gratitude and hospitality that the Ukrainians offered me. It is very complex for a European to understand the strong sense of nationalism and pride in one’s origins, and almost impossible to imagine living in a society where one’s parents could not claim their nationality without risking being oppressed by the government.

This work is an attempt, in my own small way, to talk about this country and all the ongoing human drama, far from the over-representation of the frontline and explosions, highlighting the daily struggles of a population who just want to live in peace on the land where they grew up, and where many have died and, they hope, will die free.