This is an automatically translated description

OLD KHATA BOOK is a photo book about huts and people. In 2020-2023, photographer Anna Ilchenko and journalist Svitlana Oslavska travelled to almost 100 villages in Ukraine: from Zakarpattia to Luhansk and from Chernihiv to Kherson (some of them are now occupied). In their photographs and recorded conversations, they sought to capture village huts at the present moment in history, as this layer of Ukrainian culture is being changed by time and destroyed by war. The book includes selected photographs and fragments of interviews.

Old Khata Book is not an encyclopedia of regional building styles, although readers will find a variety of hut building traditions here. It is a documentary essay at the intersection of photography and literature, reportage and visual history. Talking to the owners of the houses, the authors started with questions about housing, but often ended up with monologues about life.

This book therefore goes beyond architecture and ethnography to a broader topic: what Ukrainians are like, how they understand home, beauty, life and death. It does not exhaust this topic, but invites us to explore it further.

Translations of all texts into English are at the end of the book.