Khromova: Serving Coffee Under Fire
Kharkiv café-cum-bar Protagoniste kept its doors open throughout the war, offering an island of normality amid shelling and air raids.
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When Olena Khromova and her husband Oleh opened the café-cum-bar Protagoniste in spring 2019, they planned to create a space to bring Kharkiv’s creative youth together.
Three years later, soldiers, international journalists and aid workers have replaced hipsters in sipping coffee and tea among the breezeblock walls and concrete pillars. The DJ nights are a distant memory; the doors are locked at 8pm, when curfew falls over Ukraine’s second largest city.
The spirit that the two entrepreneurs envisaged, however, remains.
“People come to forget about the reality of war,” Khromova told IWPR, gazing around the cafe-cum-bar which has become more than a business venture to her.
“People come to forget about the reality of war.”
In the last year, she continued, she had learned to take responsibility for others in the face of danger. Kharkhiv’s proximity to the Russian border, a mere 40 kilometres away, means that the city experienced relentless shelling, food shortages and electricity cuts.
“The first two weeks were like a movie. The psyche just blocked the feeling of fear,” Khromova said, adding, ““I realised that I could not leave the city, because I had a responsibility towards Protagoniste and the 30 people who worked with us at that time.”
Although the café shut in the first days of the war, it re-opened in late March and has remained open for business ever since. The staff, which shrank to five, delivered food to people who needed it during the first weeks of the war: conventional supply chains stopped working because of artillery shelling, and it became difficult to buy food for many residents, particularly the elderly.
Khromova and her husband remained in Kharkiv even after a Russian missile hit the city council building near their house, partially destroying the premises of another of their enterprises, the Shuk restaurant.
Khromova travelled outside her native Kharkiv only once. In defiance of a shrinking economy and decreasing salaries, she teamed up with the architect who designed Protagoniste, Slava Balbek, and Kyiv entrepreneur Sashko Borovsky and in October 2022 opened Vartsab, a restaurant in the capital.
“I do not think it was a brave step, life is calmer in Kyiv,” she said, noting that despite this, “In Kharkiv, everyone goes back to work within five minutes after the explosions, and in Kyiv, people still head to the bomb shelters.”
The husband-and-wife team cannot make long-term financial plans, but believe that Kharkiv, slowly trying to regain a sense of self, will go through a renaissance.
Nonetheless, Khromova acknowledged, “The city will not be the same as before.”
