Liza Datsenko, an ethnologist from Kyiv, purchased a derelict cottage in the village of Mliiv, Cherkasy region, and transformed it into a living space of cultural memory — complete with a wood-fired stove, authentic green doors from the late 1800s, and not a single gas pipe in sight.
The Heritage That Didn’t Exist — and Was Built From Scratch
The impulse came from loss. Liza’s grandmothers died early, leaving nothing material behind. “Rather than grieve the absence of heritage, I decided to create my own,” she explains. The cottage was to become something she could inherit — and pass on.
The search took nearly two years. Together with her father — an experienced carpenter who served as the project’s “technical director” — Liza drove across almost the entire Cherkasy region, cross-referencing Facebook groups for rural property listings and visiting houses in batches of up to six per weekend. Her criteria were specific: a clay or timber-framed house, a functioning wood-burning stove, and a location on the right bank of the Dnipro between the towns of Smila and Kyiv.
The Discovery — Almost Accidental
The Mliiv house was found in an unlikely way. A real estate agent arrived to show another property but had forgotten the keys. While waiting, a local elderly woman stopped a passing car with a wave of her hand, exchanged a few words with the driver, and turned to Liza: “Follow them.” That lead brought Liza to neighbours Oleksandr and Maria, who unlocked the home of Paraskeva Dmytrivna — and the moment Liza saw the stove and the green doors, she knew.
Paraskeva — known simply as Pasha — now lives in Chernihiv with her children, having left the house two years prior due to age. She wanted to pass it to someone who would understand and preserve it. When Liza told her she was searching for “her own heritage,” both women cried on the phone. “It felt as though we’d known each other for a hundred years,” Liza says.
Renovation: Authenticity First
The restoration honours the original wherever possible. The late-19th-century green doors have been stripped and are ready to be repainted in their original colour. Walls and the stove were whitewashed using traditional lime technique. A former storage room became a bathroom with a mosaic floor of two-toned broken ceramic tiles and a hand-drilled clay bowl repurposed as a basin. The curtains hanging there once belonged to Liza’s grandmother’s summer kitchen.
The kitchen features Opishne ceramic tiles sourced from a now-defunct pottery factory — found via a Facebook listing from a man who had salvaged them from a demolished Poltava-region farmhouse where they once clad the stove. A traditional wooden dish rack (mіsnyk), the very first item Liza bought before she even had a house, set the aesthetic tone for everything that followed.
The only fully modern space is the bathroom. Elsewhere, restoration techniques and period details prevail. The electrical wiring was replaced in full for fire safety, but in some rooms the original high-mounted switch positions — a feature of mid-20th-century Ukrainian village homes — were deliberately kept.
The Stove: Heart of the House
The centrepiece is a four-section wood-burning stove with a heated sleeping shelf (lezhanка). It heats two bedrooms, was used to cook borscht at Christmas and to bake Easter bread (paska) in spring. Paper baking moulds turned out unsuitable for a wood oven — traditional clay paskivnyky (Easter bread pots) from vintage shops saved the day. On Christmas, the sleeping shelf was covered with hay found in the barn, and the smell of warm hay was exactly what Liza had imagined when she first dreamed of owning a house with a stove.
“Every time I walk into the room with the stove, I lose my breath,” she says. There is no gas in the house — and that is intentional.
Mliiv: A Village With Deep Memory
The village carries centuries of history. The hill behind the house — a man-made mound the locals call Mohyla (Burial Mound) — witnessed the Mongol invasions, battles of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, and the Korsun-Shevchenkivska offensive of winter 1944. Mliiv appears in early Slavic chronicles, including the Tale of Bygone Years.
In the 19th century, the village was home to what was then the largest sugar refinery in Europe, built by the Symyrenko family alongside a brickworks and a machine-building plant. The Symyrenkos — who began as serfs — treated their workers as free people at a time of serfdom across the Russian Empire, building housing quarters, a hospital, pharmacy, theatre, and library. They also provided funding for the first publication of Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar in 1840. Later, a horticultural research institute in Mliiv produced the Renet Symyrenka apple — a winter variety now grown in over 30 countries.
Easter Traditions and Living Ritual
As an ethnologist, Liza studies Ukrainian ritual culture. She notes that traditional Ukrainian society organised the year around four main celebrations: Easter, Kupala (24 June), Pokrova (1 October), and Christmas (25 December). All other seasonal rituals radiated from these four anchors.
“The biggest part of Easter is the preparation, not the feast itself. If you map it out: seven weeks of Lent, then a week of cleaning, dyeing eggs, baking — and only then the day itself. The celebration is the final chord of a much longer process,” she explains.
She is firm, however, that tradition need not be followed literally to stay alive. “If we can take something from this tradition and integrate it into contemporary life so that it continues to exist — that’s what matters. Tradition is alive when it fits its time.”
Additional Facts
- The Renet Symyrenka apple — bred in Mliiv in the 19th century — is today one of Ukraine’s most widely cultivated winter apple varieties and is grown in more than 30 countries.
- The first edition of Kobzar by Taras Shevchenko (1840) was published in part thanks to financial backing from the Symyrenko family of Mliiv.
- Opishne, Poltava region, is one of Ukraine’s oldest ceramic centres, active since the 17th century. It was designated a National Reserve of Folk Art in the 1990s.
- The custom of clearing the house while Easter bread baked is often explained symbolically, but ethnologists suggest a practical origin: to prevent vibrations that would cause the leavened dough to collapse.
- Easter Sunday falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox — the date shifts each year between late March and early May depending on which calendar (Gregorian or Julian) a church follows.
- Ukraine has over 28,000 villages. Many traditional clay-and-timber homes with functioning stoves are lost each year to neglect or demolition — making preservation projects like Liza’s increasingly rare.
- The Korsun-Shevchenkivska offensive (January–February 1944) was one of the largest Soviet encirclements of the Second World War, trapping two German army corps near the Cherkasy region — the fields around Mliiv were part of that theatre of war.
Based on a documentary video by the Ukrainian YouTube channel “Ivanka Rozpovidaie” (Part 1 of the Mliiv house and Easter traditions series).