July 25

​Today Great Grandmother has chosen to walk to the Scythian tombs we had seen in the distance. ‘I came up among these Scythian tombs in the years after the war because I found that the sights and sounds up here could somehow settle my mood. I was so angry and frustrated as I struggled to accept my stipulated role as wife, mother and as a housebound daughter in law’.
 
‘In those wartime years the women around me had also experienced times of feeling helpless and of their lives being shaped by outside forces so much larger than anything they could influence. When things were particularly bad, because the rumours from the war were all about disasters, or because we had had some bad accident among the herds, we all used to walk over here’.
 
‘It was the marmots on these hillsides that made our hearts sing again. They are nervous, shy animals. But somehow they got used to our visits to the tombs. We got endless amusement from their antics. They reminded us that life carries on. So this place with its strange combination of wide open views, ancient history and scurrying animals came to stand for us for survival. And that gave us the strength to go on. It was the same for me after the war’.