Looking for a Street Sign in Kharkiv

By Matthew Parish

Saturday 3 October 2026

There are occasions in wartime when the most elementary tasks become unexpectedly complicated. You are not trying to cross the front line, find a military headquarters concealed in a forest or locate some obscure village whose name has disappeared from every map except one produced by the Soviet General Staff in 1973. You are standing in the centre of Kharkiv, one of the largest cities in Ukraine, looking for a street sign.

Under normal circumstances this ought to take perhaps thirty seconds. You look at your telephone, the little blue dot tells you where you are, you look upwards at the corner of the nearest building and there is the name of the street. Modern civilisation has devoted billions of dollars, thousands of satellites and several decades of computer science to ensuring that nobody ever again has to suffer the indignity of asking a stranger where he is. Then you come to wartime Kharkiv and discover that all this technological ingenuity may suddenly be of remarkably little assistance.

The telephone says that you are somewhere else. It may say that you are several streets away or decide that you are travelling at an improbable speed in an improbable direction. The little blue dot, ordinarily one of the more reassuring symbols of contemporary life, begins wandering around the map with the confidence of a drunk who has forgotten where he lives. Satellite navigation is vulnerable to electronic warfare and interference with GPS has become one of the commonplace technological features of the war in Ukraine. The phenomenon is not peculiar to civilian telephones: interference with satellite navigation has become a serious military problem as well.

So you put the telephone away and decide to employ an older technology: your eyes. This turns out not to be quite as straightforward as expected because the building on the first corner has no street sign. Perhaps it once did. There is a pale rectangle on the wall where something appears to have been attached, while the building opposite has rather more fundamental difficulties because several of its windows have disappeared and part of its façade has been damaged. A third building has scaffolding, boards and the miscellaneous architectural scars that accumulate when a city has spent years being struck by missiles and drones.

You walk to the next junction and there is no sign. At another junction there is a sign, but it is facing the wrong way for you to read it from where you are standing. You cross the road, avoiding a pothole that may simply be a pothole because even in wartime Ukraine retains ordinary potholes, and discover that this is not the street you thought it was. At this point an interesting psychological transformation takes place: what began as navigation becomes archaeology.

You start studying the city. You examine plaques on buildings, look at shop addresses, search for the tiny numbers beside entrances and compare architectural landmarks with the pictures on your telephone. You try to remember whether the enormous building behind you was supposed to be north or south of where you were going. You begin navigating as people must have done before smartphones, except that they generally had the considerable advantage that their cities had not recently been subjected to repeated aerial bombardment.

There is another complication peculiar to contemporary Ukraine: street names have changed. Kharkiv has undergone an extensive process of removing Soviet and Russian imperial names from its urban geography, and the linguistic and historical vocabulary of the city has been changing around the physical city itself. Therefore an old mental map, an old photograph, an elderly resident’s directions and the current sign attached to a building may occasionally appear to belong to slightly different versions of Kharkiv.

War has also given road signs an unexpectedly strategic importance. At the beginning of the full-scale invasion Ukrainian authorities deliberately removed signs across the country so that advancing Russian forces would have greater difficulty navigating. Something as mundane as a piece of metal bearing the name of a road had suddenly become part of national defence, which gives the search for a street sign in Kharkiv a faintly surreal quality. The civilian pedestrian and the invading army have, at different moments and for radically different reasons, encountered the same problem: where exactly am I?

Eventually you see somebody and thereby rediscover the oldest navigation system known to humanity. You ask where the street is and the person looks at you as though the answer is obvious, which of course it is to him. He points behind you. You have been walking in the wrong direction.

There is something distinctly Kharkivian about accepting this information without embarrassment because everyone has more important things to worry about. The city lives under continuing threat and the dangers of missiles, drones and electronic warfare have become intertwined with the routines of everyday movement. Against that background, being lost for fifteen minutes is an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe, so you thank the stranger, turn around and retrace your steps.

Then comes the moment that captures something important about life in a city at war. You walk past the shattered building again and beside it is a café. The café is open, somebody is drinking coffee, a delivery driver is carrying boxes through a doorway and two women are discussing something on the pavement. A tram passes somewhere nearby while a man walks a small and profoundly uninterested dog. Kharkiv continues, not because the war has ceased to matter but because a city of more than a million people cannot suspend ordinary existence indefinitely.

That is perhaps what outsiders sometimes misunderstand about cities under bombardment. They imagine destruction as a single overwhelming spectacle: ruined buildings, smoke, sirens and frightened civilians permanently running somewhere. There are moments like that, but war lasting years cannot remain permanently spectacular because human beings would be incapable of living through it. Instead war becomes incorporated into the routines of ordinary existence and the extraordinary gradually acquires the appearance of the mundane.

You buy groceries beneath windows protected by boards, arrange meetings around air-raid alerts and learn which underground stations make convenient shelters. You charge batteries whenever electricity is available, notice generators without consciously noticing them and become accustomed to buildings whose missing windows would once have seemed extraordinary. Occasionally you spend twenty minutes looking for a street sign because the satellites above you have become participants in an electronic war, and somehow this too becomes part of the daily choreography of the city.

The strangest thing is how quickly all this starts to seem normal, yet it is not normal and that distinction matters. Adaptation is one of humanity’s greatest talents, but it can disguise the extraordinary circumstances to which people have adapted. A resident of Kharkiv who calmly gives directions beside a bomb-damaged building is not demonstrating that destruction has ceased to matter. He is demonstrating that life insists upon continuing around destruction, because the alternative would be to surrender the rhythms of the city to those seeking to destroy it.

Eventually you find the street. The sign is attached high upon the corner of a building and, once discovered, appears absurdly obvious. You wonder how you could possibly have missed it. The GPS remains confused, the building beside you carries scars from the war and somewhere in the distance comes one of the sounds that everybody in Kharkiv has learned to interpret before deciding whether it deserves immediate attention.

You look at the street sign once more and continue walking. For a few minutes you know exactly where you are, and in wartime Kharkiv that can feel like an achievement.