Tower and Town, September 2025 (view the full edition)Olia Hercules - Strong Roots: A Ukrainian Family Story Through War, Exile and Hope
Yet in February 2022, as the Russian tanks rolled into her home region of Kherson, the London-based Ukrainian chef and food writer couldn't even chop a cabbage without bursting into tears. Cooking - the heart of her sense of family and homeland - felt both frivolous and a betrayal. How could she cook while her brother defended Kyiv and her parents lived under occupation? But how else to greet her parents when, in April 2022, they escaped Ukraine? Preparing to meet them in a villa in Italy, chopping supermarket vegetables and herbs to make borsch speaks volumes: "You are safe, I am here, ... as long we can sit around a table together... it cannot be the end." The 2022 invasion of Ukraine catapults Hercules into telling her family's story to "help myself heal and to make you understand". Woven through moving, often painful, tales of generational trauma, is a joyful ode to home and heritage, to stories and recipes passed down the generations. Hercules dishes up food-laden family gatherings, the tang of sour cherries from the orchard at her parent's house, the taste of borsch cooked with beetroot dug from the veg patch not an Italian supermarket aisle. Olia Hercules will be talking to broadcaster and podcaster Hannah MacInnes in the Town Hall at 11.30am on Saturday 27 September. Mary-Vere Parr |
