The underground bomb shelter where the singers, dancers, and musicians of Kharkiv’s National Academic Opera and Ballet Theater perform isn’t much to look at.
Stark concrete pillars ring the cramped, low-ceilinged space; dull and dusty ventilation ducts hang in unavoidable view. There is no orchestra pit, and the woefully small stage rises just a couple of feet above a flat floor where 400 stackable chairs are arranged in rows.
The acoustics? Hardly befitting a storied opera company that rivals Europe’s finest.
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Kharkiv, Ukraine, one of Europe’s great cultural centers, is pummeled almost nightly by Russian strikes. Yet its bomb-shelter national opera house serves as a cathedral, a beacon of stubborn faith and undimmed human spirit.
And yet, for the people of Kharkiv – one of Europe’s great cultural centers, now pummeled and traumatized almost nightly by Russian drones and missiles – this shoebox basement theater is a cathedral, a beacon of inspiration and stubborn faith in an undimmed human spirit.
“This is a holy place for Kharkiv residents, it’s a shrine – and what we do here is like a prayer,” says Zhanna Chepela, the theater’s stage director, who this summer directed the operatic version of the seminal 18th-century Ukrainian poem “Aeneid.” The Ukrainian work is a parody of Virgil’s epic poem of loss and renewal.
“For us – the performers and the audience – being here allows us to shut the door on everything going on around us and to enter a space where we can breathe and renew our faith in love and hope,” says Ms. Chepela on a recent afternoon as she oversees rehearsals for “Aeneid.”
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“Outside these walls, it’s fear and terror and loss,” she adds. “But inside, it’s a process of mental healing for all of us.”
The makeshift auditorium in the national theater’s storage and set-production space debuted in April, more than three years after invading Russian forces made a quick target of Kharkiv, a city of 1.2 million people just 20 miles from the border.
On Feb. 23, 2022, the National Theater’s ballet company had presented a glittering production of “Giselle” in the 1,500-seat main theater of the modernist performing arts complex. The next day, Russia launched its invasion and was soon on Kharkiv’s doorstep, sending mortar rounds and waves of missiles into the city.
The Soviet-era cultural center, with its stone slabs and polished woods from around the U.S.S.R., appeared to be a favorite target of the Russian onslaught. Most of the building’s 21,000 square feet of windows were shattered, facade slabs of Armenian stone fell, the massive roof was pierced. (One unexploded bomb, now deactivated, remains lodged in the roof – left there as a symbol of Russian terror and Kharkiv’s resistance.)
Kharkiv’s beloved opera and ballet theater had no choice but to close.
But Igor Tuluzov, the theater’s director-general, knew in his heart that Kharkiv needed its national theater.
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“For Kharkiv, this theater is like a vital part of the body without which the body cannot live,” says Mr. Tuluzov, who trained as a physicist and still scribbles complex equations on a white board in his office.
“That was true even before the war,” he says. “But with the invasion it became even more clear that we have an essential role to provide spiritual and emotional relief.”
And so even though the theater lost more than half of its staff of 800 to internal displacement, emigration, or military enlistment, Mr. Tuluzov organized ways for the show to go on.
Small groups of musicians and singers performed in shelters and military hospitals. Perhaps most memorably, opera divas descended into underground subway stations where Kharkiv’s residents took shelter from bombing salvos – bringing many of the overnight refugees to tears with beloved arias.
Still, Mr. Tuluzov knew that the people of Kharkiv longed to be back inside the city’s national theater building.
Ukraine has four national theaters, but Kharkiv’s, opened in 1925, was the first, as the city was then Ukraine’s capital, as well as a cultural and university center. Construction commenced on today’s mammoth Soviet modernist cultural complex in the 1960s, but its doors didn’t open until 1991 – just months before the Soviet Union’s collapse.
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With the Russian war dragging on, Mr. Tuluzov was certain that city authorities would never accept a reopening of the opulent but vulnerable main theater. But what about the vast basement spaces where some rehearsals were held and sets were designed, built, and stored?
The idea he began exploring in 2024 got the go-ahead, and, in April, the opera reopened with Verdi’s “La Traviata.”
With the basement stage only one-quarter the size of the main theater’s, performers scaled back their movements, at times awkwardly by their own accounts. The sound system sometimes faltered.
But the audience was thrilled to be back – and Kharkiv residents have been filling the bomb-shelter theater’s opera and ballet performances ever since.
“Here, we don’t feel depressed. We feel uplifted to be with our favorite artists in this city of the arts that we all love,” says Ludmila Andriieva, who chose to move to Kharkiv five years ago in part because of its rich cultural offerings.
As she prepares to exit the basement theater after a recent performance of the ballet “Dragon Songs” – a new work written by Ukrainian electronic music composer Maksim Kolomiiets – Ms. Andriieva acknowledges that the bomb shelter theater can’t compare with the grandeur of the empty main theater above.
“But that doesn’t matter,” she says. Patting her heart, she adds: “Coming here to this special place allows my soul to survive and feel inspired.”
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Others who have come out for “Dragon Songs” say attending this and other basement productions is more than a means of surviving the war. It’s also a way of confronting and subverting it.
“Yes, there are attacks on Kharkiv almost every day, people are dying, people are losing their homes,” says Danila Atanov, a Ukrainian traditional folk dancer. “Yet despite all that we are able to work and create this cultural fabric” that is like “a comforting blanket for our city.”
Just then, Mr. Atanov’s wife and folk-dancing partner, Elizabet, walks up, and he tells her: “I was just saying that this theater, even if it is underground, says we are a city of culture. But more than that, it says something true about Kharkiv; that we are not just a city of survivors, but we are thriving, a city with a soul and a spirit this war cannot kill.”
