Piatro and Yulia Marchenka

Yulia:

After graduating from the music academy, I led a boys’ choir. I met Pyotr at a Belarusian band’s concert; NRM. He intrigued me with stories about hitchhiking travels. I had always wanted to try it, and I had never slept in a tent before. That summer, we went to the Arctic together, to the Hibiny Mountains, and climbed Mount Marchenka, which sounded like our surname. Although, back then, it was only Pyotr’s surname.

I spent a year and a half in a Belarusian prison, working as a seamstress sewing uniforms for the internal troops. I hadn’t sewn before, only the white-red-white flag. In the penal colony, I also taught African songs to female prisoners. I had previously taught these songs to my boys’ choir. One of them was the Zulu song “Siyahamba.”

Pyotr:

I’m a self-taught musician, but I work as a programmer. I met Yulia at a concert. I was immediately drawn to the petite blonde with glasses, so I decided to strike up a conversation with a joke. It worked. We celebrated my birthday, August 16th, during the polar day in the Hibiny Mountains. It also happened to be on August 16th that we committed our “crime” for which we ended up in prison.

While in the penal colony, I managed to craft five flutes from plastic tubes taken from cables, which were used for metal extraction. At the detention center “Voladarka”, I organized a drum battle with a musician from the philharmonic who was in a cell below. When I landed in prison, I immediately realized that I needed to gather my strength, that now we need to live like this and forget how we lived before. This attitude helped me a lot.

Political prisoners don’t become free after being released from jail. They’re put on record and monitored. Once a week, they have to check in at the police station, and always carry a phone for examination. Ex-political prisoners are not allowed to subscribe to opposition pages, otherwise they get detained right away.

The official reason for our prison sentence was as follows: “Using musical instruments, they engaged citizens in an unsanctioned mass procession. The musicians’ performance intensified the atmosphere of protest and incited the participants to unlawful actions against the police.”

Yulia and Piotr Marchenka arrived in Poland in 2023.