First Person
By Bohdan Cherniawski
August 24, 2025
At Queen’s Park, a weathered Crimean War cannon stood as Ukraine’s flag was raised — a reminder that what prevails is not metal but resolve.
I stood at Queen’s Park on a hot August afternoon, surrounded by voices singing the Ukrainian national anthem. The blue and yellow flag climbed the pole, catching the wind, bright against the sky. People around me lifted their phones to capture the moment, but my eyes drifted lower, to the ground in front of the Legislature, where a weathered bronze cannon has sat for generations.
It’s easy to overlook. Most visitors walk past without noticing. But I couldn’t take my eyes off it. The bronze was streaked green with age, patches catching the sunlight like scars. I ran my hand along the barrel — warm from the afternoon heat, rough where the metal had pitted. This wasn’t just another old monument. It had once roared over Crimea, then crossed an ocean to sit in Toronto as a war trophy. Other cannons from that same battlefield had been melted down to strike the first Victoria Crosses. Standing there, I felt the weight of both histories in the metal: from bronze came destruction, from bronze came honour.
And there it stood in 2025, silent and inert, while the Ukrainian flag rose above it. A relic of a nineteenth-century war in Crimea facing a symbol of today’s war for Crimea and beyond. The sight unsettled me.
History never really ends. Crimea was a battlefield then. It is a battlefield now.
I remembered reading how Britain and its allies once declared victory there, believing they had stopped Russian expansion for good. Cannons like this one were shipped across the empire as trophies, proof that the danger had been subdued. But standing in Toronto, I thought of how wrong that was. Russia again occupies Crimea. Sevastopol is once more a frontline. Mariupol and Kherson, names I never heard in school, are now added to the map of pain. What was supposed to be finished business has returned.
For a moment, I felt the weight of generations pressing on me. My grandparents had arrived in Canada with little more than memory and hope. My grandmother often spoke of her village — how the church bells fell silent, how neighbours vanished overnight. I still remember the quiet intensity in her voice when she would lean closer and say, “Never forget where we came from, because it will return in another form.”
As a child, I thought she meant only our family stories. But as the anthem swelled around me at Queen’s Park, the summer heat pressing against my skin and the flag snapping in the wind, I realized she had been speaking about history itself. Every generation must rise to the occasion, for freedom is fleeting — and the fall hurts more than the rise.
The cannon in front of me seemed to whisper: empires return. Battles recur. Bronze outlasts treaties.
But its meaning has shifted. Once a prize of conquest, it has become something else — a backdrop to resilience. Its silence clashed with the anthem in the air, with the voices of children beside me who knew the words though they were born here in Canada. That silence framed a different kind of courage: not the kind awarded with medals, but the everyday courage of survival, endurance, refusal.
I thought of those Victoria Crosses, struck from Sevastopol’s guns to honour bravery. And then I thought of Ukrainians today — soldiers holding the line in mud and snow, families piecing homes back together after missile strikes, exiles in Toronto wiring money back home and showing up at rallies. Valor has shifted from bronze to will.
As the flag reached the top of the pole, a lump rose in my throat. Around me, people cheered, but I was caught between past and present. The cannon, green with age, spoke of a history that was supposed to be over. The flag, rippling in the breeze, made clear that it was not.
And that is the lesson. Weapons can be seized. Bronze can be melted. Empires can collapse. What endures — what ultimately prevails — is the will and the tenacity to face what comes.
When I opened my eyes, the contrast before me was overwhelming: a nineteenth-century bronze cannon, silent and weathered, and a twenty-first-century flag, bright against the summer sky. One a relic of an old struggle, the other a living claim to freedom.
Once forged in bronze, now forged in will. In that will lies Ukraine’s endurance — a clarion call to all who cherish freedom and stand ready to defend it.
Bohdan Cherniawski is a Canadian military veteran, historian, and writer focused on Eastern European political history, intelligence, and global health in conflict zones.
