"There is a particular fear of the afternoon hours, when brightness, silence and heat are nearing the limit, when Pan plays his pipe, when the day reaches its full heat."

Embroidered icons made by Ukranian women imprisoned in the Soviet gulags, by Olga (surname unknown), 1946, and Hanna Protskiv-Liven, 1949.

As Dr. Oksana Kis, scholar of Ukranian women in history, describes, “There was...a need for religious rituals, although this was strictly prohibited in the gulag. The women managed to make thin ropes from rye bread and little crosses from toothbrushes and embroider little icons on some scraps of cloth, to which they prayed as if it were a genuine church image. They conducted group prayers on Sundays and improvised liturgies on major feasts. The women themselves performed the liturgical roles of the priest and the deacon, which is absolutely ruled out for women in customary life. In those conditions, their need for the Divine Service was stronger than principles of the church canon.”

The women would make the embroideries for and present them to their friends, for whom the embroidered entreaties beg for freedom and mercy.

‘To be parted from your house, your father’s house— it oughtn’t be allowed! It is worse than dying! I would rather die. Oh, poor girls! Can what they call civilization be right, if one mayn’t die in the room where they were born?’

— Howards End (1910) by E.M. Forster