Strong Roots

Olia Hercules has spent a decade travelling across the Ukraine, collecting and preserving precious recipes and traditions from her home country. For nearly as long, she has wanted to share the tales from three generations of her extraordinary family: their quests, their resilience and their sufferings, as well as their joy, their quirks, and their food.

Hercules confronts the lineage of Ukrainian history through the perspective of her grandparents who endured forced emigration, near starvation and wrongful imprisonment. She thoughtfully traces her own childhood during the collapse of the Soviet Union. And comes to terms with the reality of her career success, inspired by her homeland's customs, at a time when Ukraine is fighting to retain those very customs and its identity in the face of conflict.

Strong Roots brims with hope and fear, it lays bare the compromises and betrayals of generations living with, while attempting to recover from, the burden of political upheaval, but is also an uplifting and tender reminder of how much the human spirit can endure when born from a land rich with strong roots.