Ballad of Stolen Happiness

It all started with a song. A folk ballad about Shandar, his mistress, and her husband Nikolayka, recorded in 1878, touched Ivan Franko's heart and he created a literary masterpiece. The story it tells is ordinary. A domestic adultery that causes community condemnation and a quick resolution. But the mystery of this song is fascinating: its main characters are saints and executioners at the same time. In the eyes of the community, for each other, for their own souls. Time will not break this circle - it changes the scenery, but it has no power over human nature. Mykola-Anna-Mykhailo and our chance to spy on them today through the windows of a modular house in the mountains. Where family harmony is tinged with longing, passion is destructive, and love is somehow untimely - fatally ordinary?

«Everything will disappear, houses can be swept away by a flood, a hurricane, a deluge. We are very temporary, there are no fuses. And history is eternal: there will always be he, she, the third. And there will always be war, crimes. For us, people, this is also temporary, for the world - eternal». Ivan Uryvsky.