In 2014, as the Russian state is annexing Crimea and deploying troops along the border with Ukraine, Victoria Belim decides to make a journey back to the village in central Ukraine where she spent much of her childhood, to see her grandmother Valentina.

Before the trip, she’d come across a line in her great-grandfather’s diary mentioning a brother whom no one in the family had ever spoken about, or seemed prepared to speak about even now, many decades later.

As Victoria begins to explores her family’s complicated history, the fate of this missing relative comes to symbolise not just her own family’s complicated background but her country’s troubled relationship with its Soviet past. In her attempt to uncover what happened to her great uncle Nikodim, all roads in the end seem to lead to an elegant building with a dark past known locally as The Rooster House.

Episode 3
On the Trail of Nikodim: a visit to her great-grandfather’s village brings Victoria closer to the missing Nikodim.

Victoria Belim is a writer, journalist and translator of Persian literature and poetry. She was born in Ukraine and moved to the USA when she was 15. She now lives in Brussels.

The reader is the Ukrainian-British actor, writer and director Vera Graziadei.

Producer: Sara Davies
Abridger: Libby Spurrier
Sound Engineer: Sean Kerwin
Production Manager: Sarah Wright

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4 Show less