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Milk and Honey at the Roadside: Experiencing Ukraine Through Its Markets

From pavement sellers to a kaleidoscope of colour

Michelle Lawson
Globetrotters
Published in
8 min readNov 18, 2024
An indoor market stall piled high with fruit, including apples, oranges, grapes. A woman in black is arranging a display of pears.
Besarabsky Market, Kyiv. Author’s photo.

Traders with expressionless faces stood behind stalls of fruit piled in alternating colours: red speckles of pomegranate seeds, darker cherries, vivid oranges and paler persimmons. Men chopped through carcasses while others sat beside limp chicken corpses. A woman in black gave off the illusion, from a distance, of a hooded grim reaper as she arranged a display of pears.

Kyiv’s famous Besarabsky market had so few customers I felt conspicuous. I avoided looking too closely in case I gave off the wrong signals. No one was buying anything.

The market is a national heritage monument, named after the old region of Bessarabia (now mostly within Moldova). A sign proclaimed the market’s centenary in 2012. But how did it sustain itself with barely any customers?

The people I was visiting had laughed when I told them I’d visit Besarabsky Market. ‘Ukrainians don’t go there. It’s really expensive, and just for tourists.’

A woman wearing a pink knotted hat stands behind a market stall piled with jars of produce.
Besarabsky Market. Author’s photo.

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Globetrotters
Globetrotters

Published in Globetrotters

We are a group of ordinary yet extraordinary travel lovers sharing our experiences of exploring the world with the world.

Michelle Lawson
Michelle Lawson

Written by Michelle Lawson

I write travel narratives, fiction and non-fiction and in a parallel life I lecture in Applied Linguistics. I’d rather be on a train in Europe. Original photos.

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