When the wind blows from the direction of the front, where artillery thunders from positions only thirty kilometers away, the sound of war reaches Kharkiv, passes through buildings and enters the center of this combative and battered city in northeastern Ukraine. Not long after, another sound bursts in, reminiscent of an old two-stroke scooter approaching, ominous and menacing: it’s the unmistakable buzz of the Iranian Shahed drone. For the residents of Kharkiv, these noises are part of daily life. After nearly four years, the weight of war is etched on the faces of exhausted citizens. But amid destruction, anxiety and fatigue, there is an effort to preserve a sense of normalcy, and dignity. Among those holding together the city’s cultural fabric is Igor Tuluzov.<\/p>\n
Tuluzov is the general and artistic director of the Kharkiv National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, known locally as KhNATOB. During the first year of the war, after his wife was evacuated to Austria, he moved into the theater with his cat and some members of the company. Since then, he has explored and come to know every corner of the building. The theater is like a labyrinth: it has a surface area of over 50,000 square meters, hundreds of rooms, narrow corridors and a large auditorium with the stage closed by a wooden curtain. The hall has 1,500 seats, and there’s a bar, a pizzeria and even a sauna. In April 2024, under Tuluzov’s direction, the theater opened an improvised stage space in the basement beneath the main hall, which once functioned as a shelter. There they built a stage that is at once defiance, resistance and hope. “We opened it for two reasons: to maintain employment for the theater team and to offer the citizens of Kharkiv a place of culture,” Tuluzov says. Today, within these brick walls, artists like Antonina Radievskaya, a Kharkiv native, continue to tread the underground stage. The recent performance by her group, “Drakony,” a modern musical by Ukrainian composer Maksym Kolomiiets, sold out with approximately 300 seats available. Radievskaya had decided, at the start of the war, to leave with her daughter. She spent nearly a year in Poland, where she continued to perform, and then returned. “It’s my city,” she said. In these performances, she and her colleagues pour their emotions into the music and movement, giving voice to a collective resistance. For the audience, it’s more than entertainment\u2014it’s a brief escape from reality.<\/p>\n
The need for an underground stage arose from the government ban on large gatherings and the danger of the nearby Russian border. On March 1, 2022, during a fierce bombing campaign against the city, the Opera Theatre was hit and subsequently devastated. The underground stage is part of a broader shift in Kharkiv: people also go to school underground, just as the city government, the university, the art museum and the emergency services headquarters operate underground. And down there, life continues\u2014this is the testament to Ukraine’s self-sufficiency and unbreakable spirit.<\/p>\n
Before the war, Kharkiv residents called KhNATOB “the aircraft carrier,” for its imposing brutalist form, and “the city of masters” for the hundreds of artists who worked there. It is one of Ukraine’s oldest musical theaters, having taken many forms, from its origins in the 19th century to the postmodern building completed in 1991, intended to be a Communist Party congress hall. At the start of the Russian invasion, dancers, opera singers and orchestra musicians, along with technical staff\u2014about 250 people\u2014left the country. Since then they have been touring in Slovakia, Poland, Italy, France, Belgium and Moldova. In Kharkiv, only a small part of the company remained: ten of them were drafted into the army and one from the technical department was killed at the front. Now, 600 people work at the theater again, from designers to choreographers to costume designers and actors. The war continues above ground: below, the opera in the basement keeps soul and art alive\u2014Ukraine’s resistance.<\/p>\n
Diego Fedele is a photographer and a journalist<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When the wind blows from the direction of the front, where artillery thunders from positions only thirty kilometers away, the sound of war reaches Kharkiv, passes through buildings and enters the center of this combative and battered city in northeastern Ukraine. Not long after, another sound bursts in, reminiscent of an old two-stroke scooter approaching, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6284,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":90,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-senza-categoria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6147"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6363,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6147\/revisions\/6363"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}