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Ukrainian Memory in Montréal: a three-part exploration

Having recently worked with the architectural organisation @heritagemtl analysing the intersection between the Ukrainian community with the Ukrainian Orthodox and Catholic traditions it felt apt to delve further into the community’s tangible and intangible history within Montreal as I continue to reside here. This I shall package as a three-part series!

Specialising previously in the second wave of migration of Ukrainians to Canada, a result of the interwar period post-1920 , more than 67,000 citizens left the state as a result of hard economic, and political conditions as well as the Holodomor famine and repressions. I will now look to the 6th wave of migration, starting in 2022 with the Russian invasion of independent Ukraine,817days

The settlement of Ukrainians in Quebec from the first wave in the early 20th century was largely accidental, eastern Canada was merely a temporary stopover for Ukrainians who stayed there only long enough to earn money and take them further into Canada to work within an agricultural domain. Canadian national policy at that time was oriented toward sending migrants west but there was a fallout of people who remained in Quebec, settling most prominently in Frontenac, Pointe St Charles and Frontenac. Those who settled in a Frontenac established the Galician or Ruthian catholic parish of St Michael Archangel.

The first minutes book of St Michael’s Ukrainian Catholic Parish was recorded as September 2 1911, a parish which would become an important community touchstone for many migrants arriving over the coming century, a moment which I will start this series from.

Chapter one, Ukrainian internment at Spirit Lake
Chapter two, the architecture and ornamentation of Cathedrale St Sophie and Catholique Ukrainienne Église St Michel
Chapter three, the relationship between migration waves and Montreal’s tangible Ukrainian Heritage. ( I would quite like to also do a fourth chapter on provista). Photographs are taken from the ‘Golden Jubilee Book Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of St Michael’s Church in Montreal’ - kindly shared with us by Olga taken in Ukrainian Catholic Church of St-Michael's by @windowtax_

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2 years ago

*sorry for my silence, I’ve moved to Montréal and forgotten how to speak English*
moving to a new city and a new country (and much less evidence of windowtax more just blocked off windows for reasons I don’t understand) has meant I’ve been thinking about more than exclusively tangible and intangible memory.
In unprecedented times where people can no longer block their windows to impact taxation, individuals have been forced to adapt to ever worsening socioeconomic challenges. The cost of living, mismatched wages, a lack of regulation on eviction powers, monopolisation of rentals and inevitable collapse of small business alongside many livelihoods has forced homeless figures to spiral.

Montréal, population 1.8 mil, known for being one of the most affordable cities in North America is now too suffering from these symptoms.
As I walk up the street of St Laurent to Little Italy , a route I’ve taken for two months I see more and more empty units , and have spoken with those who are closing after 30 years of business.
Why with so many units there are so many that continue to be homeless in the world’s second largest country?
Development, on each street corner with it be a closing shoe shop or long established grocer there is a crane , developing property few will be able to afford with rising construction costs and evermore shallow government funded pockets. The homeless community continue to be pushed into tighter corners moved from established locations such as , the notre-dame camp for what use? To be spread evermore thinly and made all the more vulnerable with less access to support ?
For those whose rent pushed into instability through extortionate rising rent prices packaged as ‘renovations’?

The province wide survey on Quebec’s homeless has found that homelessness has almost doubled in just four years, with now approximately 3000 unhoused persons living in Montréal. As stated in Ma Cité Evincée 2023 by Gulain Levasseur ‘it’s not camping, it’s survival’.
For more information on the Notre-Dame camp community and Fontaine flat resistance movement please watch Ma Cité Évincée. *third photo courtesy of Mile End Ensemble Facebook group, the rest are mine* taken in Montreal, Quebec by @windowtax_

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3 years ago

Window tax, something which I find consistently surprising, particularly in its evidencing of how infrequently I seem to actually look up. I suppose by its very nature it is something that is both readily and unintentionally overlooked despite it epitomising the distorting impacts of early taxation.

The tax fabled as the source of where the phrase “daylight robbery” originates as a result of it by proxy being a tax on both air and light.

First introduced in 1696 by Wiliam III to cover revenue by the cost of clipping coinage, it was repealed in 1851 after over a century of campaigning.
Intended as a progressive tax so that houses with a smaller number of windows, initially 10, were subject to a 2 shilling house tax but exempt from the window tax. Houses with more than 10 windows were liable for additional taxes which increased in line with the number of windows. The poorest, who were more likely to live in houses with fewer windows, were therefore in theory taxed less. This principle worked when applied to the rural poor, but failed to alleviate any burden on the urban poor.

Those living in accommodation without sufficient light and ventilation as a result of bricked up windows became subject to epidemics of typhus, smallpox and cholera.

The impact of the tax can be seen in the fact that, in 1766, when the tax was extended to include houses with 7+ windows, the number of houses in England and Wales with exactly 7 windows reduced by nearly 2/3.
This is perhaps a sort of unintentional cultural landscape or touch stone, a nod to Britain’s ever extending legacy of inconsistent taxation measures. taken in Highbury and Islington by @windowtax_

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3 years ago

IN LOVING MEMORY

Cemeteries both religious and private are deliberately created and initially were intended to be extremely ordered cultural landscapes.

Graveyards aren’t always the lightest of topics but I feel they are a theme I should address as a result of them being maybe one of THE most personal forms of tangible heritage we have as individuals, despite the individual never being able to actually see it (maybe beyond the grave). Despite them being SO personal they are often in many cases one of the least engaged with pieces of tangible heritage, particularly within British culture.

Graves, originally sold with a sense of perpetuity, have been in decline since the 1800s. So perhaps the idea was doomed from the start, particularly in the more densely populated areas of Britain. As generations became evermore distant and eventually forgotten with the passing of the years, graveyards have become increasingly overgrown and neglected. This leaves spaces such as Hygate Cemetary to be dominated by the living in the form of the ever-growing natural world and those paying their respects to the likes of Karl Marx and Historian Eric Hobsbawm.

The melding of differing minimalist and Victorian architectures in one space over time within cemeteries such as Highgate make for an extremely unique cultural landscape which is never or attempts to be in stasis.

Cemeteries serve both a functional and emotional purpose, they thus are both sacred and profane and are a topic which I have only started to scrape the surface of. taken in Highgate Cemetery by @windowtax_

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3 years ago

Heritage is constructed surrounding ideas of identity, status, social values, philosophical significance and economic exploitation; physical or tangible heritage is simply a vehicle for these concepts.

Therefore, culture can be seen as memory prompts to summon ideas of both identity and experience. Cultural heritage, in the form of monuments (also understood as tangible heritage) has a huge role in national identity construction and is frequently welcomed and rejected by society as the honest projection of ethnic history, collective memory and nostalgia.

Collective (also common memory) is when individual memories interact within a framework provided by societal memory and consequently, a shared attitude to representations of the past reinforced by architecture. It is important to recognise that culture and heritage are NOT stasis and are constantly being recreated, altered and adapted.

Destruction of monuments can present affected societies with different feelings and meanings. The toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in 2003, of the statue of Columbus in Minnesota in 2020 or the demolition of the Mostar Bridge in 1993, all invoke extremely different feelings of liberation, desperation and agony.

Cultural heritage can be intentionally targeted as a vehicle of the identity of other communities. Viewed as artefacts of an enemy or a population- a means of dividing, terrorising, dominating or destroying it altogether. Erasure of the memories, histories and identities attached to place and architecture -enforced forgetting-is the goal.

OR more recently it has had a new role of funding terrorist organisations and informal economies through blood antiquity via looting in locations of conflict and fragility.

Eric Hobsbawm (1983) identifies history as being “the new material for nationalist, or ethnic, or fundamentalist ideologies, as poppies are the raw material for heroin addiction...if there is no suitable past it can always be invented. The past legitimises, the past gives a more glorious background to a present that doesn’t have much to show for itself.” taken in Winnipeg, Manitoba by @windowtax_

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3 years ago