20 September 2024

Kerosene Lamps as a Symbol of Remembrance for the Victims of Repression of the Crimean Tatar People

On the day of the Fourth Summit of the Crimea Platform, the Memorial to the Victims of the Genocide of the Crimean Tatar People was unveiled. During the event, high-ranking officials honored the memory of those who perished as a result of the repressive policies of the Russian Empire, Soviet authorities, and the modern Russian Federation. Placing kerosene lamps in the center of the composition—a sculpture of a bowl with a cypress tree—was a symbolic gesture of remembrance of how the occupiers violated the peace of the home of many generations of the Crimean Tatar people.

In his article about the beginnings of Crimean Tatar theater, Crimean Tatar art critic Ismet Zaatov describes his childhood memories. He notes that in the past, on winter evenings, in many Crimean Tatar homes, grandmothers and mothers would perform mini-performances in the light of a kerosene lamp, using their hands, fingers, and various objects on a screen wall to entertain children. Most of the time, the shadowy images of fictional characters, birds, and animals were accompanied by the reading or telling of fairy tales.

It was with these kerosene lamps that tens of thousands of Crimean Tatar families were hastily packing their belongings when soldiers and NKVD operatives broke into their homes at dawn on May 18, 1944. While the men were at the war front, women, children, and older people were brutally and without any explanation herded into trains that took them thousands of kilometers away from their homeland.

After arriving in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan, deported Crimean Tatars found in their belongings the very kerosene lamps that accompanied them in their last moments in their home. Thus, kerosene lamps often became a reminder of the warm memories of life before the deportation, sparking the hope of Crimean Tatars to return from a foreign land.

In the tenth year of the occupation of the Crimean Peninsula, we proudly continue to preserve the culture of one of the Indigenous Peoples of Ukraine, the Crimean Tatars. The kerosene lamps, painted by Crimean Tatar artists using elements of the ornamentation of the ornek, have been burning and will continue to burn to honor the memory of the Crimean Tatars’ ancestors and contemporaries killed by Russia.

Ölgenlerniñ ruhuna El Fatiha!