No matter how hard Russia tried to wipe the Crimean Tatar people off the face of the earth, they nurtured their culture, art, and traditions in exile and fought to return to their native Crimean Peninsula. The dominance of Russia was never created by a choice of goodwill: not in language, culture, or history.
It is a duty to remember the innocent victims of genocide, and it is an extraordinary strength of the citizens of our country to shout about them as loudly as possible. Art has become the mouthpiece of memory, which contains a repository of national identity, a belief in self-sufficiency, and, above all, the art is full of pain that the hoarse voice is not enough to express. The restored photographs of a Crimean Tatar family have become paintings, rooms were full of authentic aesthetics of the indigenous people of Ukraine, the stories of Crimean Tatar artists and ordinary individuals who transcended the ordinary to protect their relatives and preserve their identity.
We remember this.
We share the pain of thousands of families whose homes were ruthlessly taken away from them by Russia in 1783, 1944, 2014, or now.
To keep the memory alive, we honor and memorialize it, we listen and hear the requiem in the voices of those who will never return home. Most importantly, we are stoking the fire of debunking the myths created by the Soviet regime, we are fighting the narratives that exterminate nations, and we urge everyone to do so now.