By Mitja Velikonja
Photographs by Mitja Velikonja

265 pages.
August 2025. Softcover. Fully illustrated in color.
$32.95 | 9781954600270 (pb)

ebook also available

An illustrated chronicle of Ukraine at war, examining expressions of the Ukrainian people on the street, in graffiti, murals, and quotidian life.

“In this evocative account … an eye for poignant detail and an urgent sense of the larger historical questions at hand makes for an immersive and unpredictable examination of war’s reverberations throughout society.” —Publishers Weekly

Traveling to wartime Ukraine several times on book tours between 2023 and 2024, Mitja Velikonja observes thousands of examples of the culture of war: from road signs to bakeries, billboards and murals, to fashion and unsanctioned graffiti. Also informed by his conversations with people, he witnesses the preparations, scenes of destruction, misery, and above all, the strong will to resist, from which everyday heroism emerges.

“While driving or waiting anywhere, I took a small test — how long does it take to come across images of war, warrior iconography, vocabulary of emphatic patriotism, the sound of a national awakening song, footage from battlefields. Mostly it was a matter of seconds.”

Although all nationalists are equally foreign to Velikonja, when he talks to people, he asks himself how he would feel in their shoes, how he would react. When war lands at our front door, it affects everyone: leftists and right-wingers, nationalists and pacifists, patriots and those who don’t care what flag they live under.

Through these cultural remnants of a people holding themselves together against an invader through a self-defensive nationalism, Velikonja sees how nationalism hides poverty and details the ways in which politics and ideology are displayed directly on the street. These essays as vignettes are critical and philosophical, even as he struggles to understand tragic events, and despite his affection for those closest to him.

PRAISE

“This evocative account … provides snapshots of everyday life in the country while analyzing the protest art and rhetoric that has emerged in response to the war. … Some of the vignettes and photographs are especially resonant and eye-opening, including an exploration of how patriotic imagery has worked its way into the design of packaged foods, and a graffito of a fierce but adorable kitten getting ready for combat. … With an eye for poignant detail and an urgent sense of the larger historical questions at hand, this makes for an immersive and unpredictable examination of war’s reverberations throughout society.” —Publishers Weekly

“Unlike other [non-Ukrainian] writers, Velikonja has directly experienced twenty rockets detonating in a city of millions. … An anti-war book, which treats people in wartime with the utmost seriousness, refusing to reduce them to mere statistics.” —Slovenian Daily DNEVNIK

“Presents us with a series of examples of the horrors of war and the optimism to resist … written in a hybrid genre, somewhere between a travelog, essay, diary, and barefoot culturology.” —Croatian Weekly NOVOSTI

“An outstanding, instructive, and deeply humane book…. written with an excellent understanding of the political situation in Ukraine, particularly its cultural and historical context…. Through a series of compellingly narrated ‘scenes’ and examples, Velikonja unmistakably shows that this is not merely a fundamental ‘clash of civilizations’ but, above all, a blatant act of territorial seizure, an appropriation of resources, and an expression of aggressive Russian chauvinism and imperialism. Putin’s ruthless war machinery and propaganda have, with relative success, ideologically wrapped this aggression in cultural, religious, nationalist, and historical justifications—something that Velikonja articulates and elaborates across ten chapters.” —Croatian Weekly Magazine POGLED

“Self-reflective witticisms and charmingly humorous moments of self-irony add to the text something eternally sought yet rarely found—genuine empathy in human relationships.” —Slovenian Daily VEČER

“From behind the front lines of the Ukrainian war, Velikonja studied its voices and iconography as they appeared in the streets, cities, parks, landscapes, libraries, and even clothing culture. Through his firsthand experience and field research, he has decoded and challenged overly simplistic, black-and-white, antagonistic views … presenting a complex and multi-layered portrait of a society at war, yet one that resolutely and persistently strives to live as normal a life as possible.” —Slovenian National Radio

“One of the most creative, inventive, and amusing ‘readers’ of contemporary Central European and Balkan ideological constellations. Velikonja invented a new science: ‘graffitology’.” —Dubravka Ugrešić, author of The Culture of Lies and The Ministry of Pain

“Velikonja suggests the flexibility of graffiti, showing both their potential to be neutered through domestication and aestheticization, as well as their capacity for serious political subversion.” —Maria Todorova, author of Imagining the Balkans

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mitja Velikonja is the author of eight books and coauthor and editor of several more. He is a Professor for Cultural Studies and head of Center for Cultural and Religious Studies at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and has recently been a full-time visiting professor in Krakow, St. Petersburg, Rijeka, at Columbia University in New York and Yale University, as well as Fulbright visiting researcher in Philadelphia, The Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies, and NYU. His recent books on post-socialist graffiti and street art from former Yugoslavia have been translated and sold widely in the region, including in Ukraine. He was the first professor from outside the country to lecture there in spring 2023, and has been one of the few visiting professors to teach in the country during the war against Russia ongoing since February 2022.

This is Velikonja’s second book with DoppelHouse Press; The Chosen Few: Aesthetics and Ideology in Football Fan Graffiti and Street Art was published in 2021 and was a finalist for a Next Generation Indie Book Award.