1993–2014
Serhii Nihoian
Maidan activist, Hero of Ukraine
An Armenian who read Shevchenko’s The Caucasus on the Maidan. Serhii Nihoian, from Bereznuvativka in Dnipropetrovsk region, dreamed of becoming an actor, stood guard on the barricades and on 22 January 2014 became the first protester killed on Hrushevskoho Street in Kyiv. He was 20.
Key accomplishments
- On the Maidan from 8 December 2013: stood guard on the barricades by the Liadski Gate and carried hot food to the Maidan Self-Defence
- From January 2014 a member of the Kalush platoon of the Third Company of the Maidan Self-Defence
- On 21 December 2013 read an excerpt from Shevchenko’s The Caucasus for a project marking Taras Shevchenko’s 200th anniversary
- Hero of Ukraine (posthumously, 2014)
The Armenian who read Shevchenko
On 21 December 2013, on the Maidan, a young bearded Armenian read an excerpt from Taras Shevchenko’s poem The Caucasus to a camera. The director Serhii Proskurnia recorded it for Our Shevchenko, a project marking 200 years since the poet’s birth. The young man was Serhii Nihoian, and he had come to Kyiv from a village in Dnipropetrovsk region.
From Bereznuvativka
Serhii was born on 2 August 1993 in the village of Bereznuvativka in Dnipropetrovsk region, into an Armenian family that had moved to Ukraine to escape the war in Nagorno-Karabakh. After school he went to a college of physical education in Dniprodzerzhynsk (now Kamianske), did karate and in 2012 came third in the city championship. But sport wasn’t what drew him: Serhii dreamed of becoming an actor and planned to apply to the Dnipropetrovsk theatre and art college. He loved radio electronics and poetry, and he dreamed of seeing the land of his ancestors.
On the Maidan barricades
Serhii first came to the Maidan on 8 December 2013, bringing an Armenian flag and the Lord’s Prayer in Armenian. He stood guard on the barricades by the Liadski Gate and carried hot food to the men of the Maidan Self-Defence. In early January 2014 the artist Volodymyr Bezrukyi, a member of the Kalush platoon of the Self-Defence’s Third Company, painted Serhii’s portrait. After that Serhii asked to join the men from Kalush, and became one of the platoon. His comrades remembered that he was always ready to stand in for a sick friend and to do two shifts in a row.
Serhii Nihoian was shot dead on 22 January 2014, Ukraine’s Day of Unity, on Hrushevskoho Street in Kyiv, near the Dynamo stadium. He was 20. He was the first protester killed on Hrushevskoho Street; two more protesters died there the same day. On 21 November 2014 he was posthumously made a Hero of Ukraine.
On 22 March 2014, just two months after his death, the town of Berezhany in Ternopil region named a street after him. His home village put up a monument to him and a plaque on the school where he had studied. In 2015 the Portuguese artist Vhils (Alexandre Farto) carved a huge portrait of Serhii, free of charge, into the wall of a building on Mykhailivska Street in Kyiv, overlooking the Heavenly Hundred Garden.
Why it matters today
Serhii Nihoian showed that being Ukrainian is not only about where your family comes from, but about what you choose. The son of an Armenian family that had come here for safety, he stood up for the dignity and freedom of the country that had become his home. An Armenian reading Shevchenko on the Maidan is a picture of the Ukraine that people of many roots build and defend together. Anyone who makes Ukraine their cause today, wherever their family comes from, carries on what Serhii stood for.
