House keys recur in the family stories of both Crimean Tatars and Palestinians displaced from their respective homelands in the 1940s, and in accounts of Ukrainian citizens fleeing Russian invasion since 2014. Maria Sonevytsky traverses ethnographic research and discourses of storytelling, art, and justice to show how house keys elicit stories, securing an exiled people’s history from oblivion.
House keys are prosaic objects that carry extraordinary significance as symbols of home, security, place. Think for a moment: what do your house keys unlock? Do you always carry your house keys with you when you leave the house, or is your door usually unlocked? Do you, like me, sometimes check for the keys in your pocket or your bag to make sure you didn’t forget them? Do you know them by their cool, metallic feel or can you recognise them by sound — their jangle or clink? Have you had your house keys for a long time? Did someone give them to you so that you could open the door to the place you call home?
In 2008, Zulfiye (not her real name) told me about her Crimean Tatar family’s house keys, which her parents passed down to her while they lived in exile following Stalin’s mass deportation of Crimean Tatars in 1944. She told me, ‘These were the keys of my parents; I carried them back to my homeland with me’. When Zulfiye returned from Uzbekistan in 1991 with her three young children, the house keys her parents had kept still fit the locks of her family’s pre-deportation home. Unable to buy it back, Zulfiye’s young family purchased a shack in the same town from which her parents had been deported a generation earlier and slowly built it into a suitable dwelling. The old keys to the lost home remained in the family — functionally useless, but symbolically potent as a reminder of the family’s journey from Crimea to Uzbekistan and back. Zulfiye’s story is not unique among Crimean Tatars. Some families, given mere minutes to pack for their deportation to an unknown destination, took their house keys with them. Was it out of habit — a reflex at leaving the home — or did they anticipate an eventual return? Could the house keys held in exile be anything more than a bitter reminder of the home that was unjustly taken?
From 2008 to 2009, as part of my ethnographic research among Crimean Tatar repatriates, I recorded a handful of Crimean Tatar family stories like Zulfiye’s about the house keys they held in exile. Their narratives suggest that house keys became much more than mere reminders of loss. These mundane objects transformed into family heirlooms, claims of ownership, and material reminders of what the Crimean Tatar political fight was and is for — even now, decades after they won the right to return to Crimea in the last years of the Soviet Union, and even now, as Russian occupation attempts to subdue those Crimean Tatars who have remained in Crimea since 2014. House keys operate today as small armour against the forgetting induced by military occupation, forced removal, and elimination. In exile, they signified a refusal to concede to the loss of a home and a homeland; after return, after the Russian occupation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, those house keys represent a yet-unfulfilled dream for equal rights and legal protections in a Crimea free from authoritarian rule. The Crimean Tatar house key is a facet of cultural heritage and a reminder of this community’s legitimate struggle to exist in the same Crimea from which they were displaced over centuries of Russian and later Soviet rule.
In this sense the house key becomes endowed with the protective powers that twentieth-century anthropologists like Franz Boas described in amulets: contextually significant objects that defend against evil. House keys prompt stories connected to the occupied home. These stories are the noise that can interrupt the regime of silence imposed through the slow violence of settler colonialism. More than inert objects, house keys ignite the fuse between an object and the act of remembering; they repel the possibility of erasure. Stories that begin with the cool, metallic fact of keys metonymically stand in for the hope of some kind of reparative justice in the long term.
Crimean Tatar stories about house keys have not yet been comprehensively collected, but rather exist in scattered archives and in literary depictions of deportation and return. It is also true that many Crimean Tatars were displaced from rural homes that would not have used door locks regularly, as Crimean Tatar photographer and researcher Emine Ziyatdin pointed out to me. Yet as I returned to my research in pursuit of stories about house keys, I started to learn about other stories, and a small but significant pattern emerged. Historian Martin-Oleksandr Kisly, who wrote about the Crimean Tatar return to Crimea in his 2021 dissertation, remarked on the symbolic meaning of house keys in Crimean Tatars’ narratives in a footnote and recounted two women’s stories.[1] The British writer, Lily Hyde, used house keys to motivate the story of a Crimean Tatar girl’s attempt to recover knowledge about her family’s lost Crimean home in her 2008 novel Dreamland. Some characters in the book experience the keys as icons of a thwarted past or burdens in the present; for the protagonist, the house keys fill in gaps about her family’s pre-deportation life and, most importantly for the story, affirm their difficult decision to return. The memories triggered by the house keys convince the fictional girl that her family’s return is just.
I told you earlier that between 2008 and 2009, as part of my ethnographic research among Crimean Tatar repatriates, I recorded a handful of Crimean Tatar family stories about the house keys they held in exile. But what I haven’t said yet is that I had nearly forgotten about these stories. I forgot about them until I entered into long and illuminating dialogues with students from Palestine who came into my classroom at the college where I teach. From them I learned that house keys have long been central to narratives of Palestinian dispossession (a commonality between Crimean Tatars and Palestinians that Kisly also noted). Palestinians annually mark the 1948 Nakba (or ‘Catastrophe’) that resulted in the flight or expulsion of an estimated 750,000 Palestinians from their homes during what Israelis commemorate as their War of Independence. To this day, Palestinians’ right to return remains a yet unachieved political goal. Ongoing Israeli settler expansion in West Bank territories continues to threaten the homes and lives of Palestinian residents. At the time of writing, Palestinians in Gaza face ongoing devastation in Israel’s brutal retaliatory campaign against the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023, which has come under increasing international condemnation.
The anthropologist, Dima Saad, describes the centrality of house keys for Palestinians, as they have been ‘mobilized from private spheres to public realms — sacralized and charted as symbols of collective loss, thereby binding networks of Palestinians in exile’.[2] Others have documented how the house key recurs in Palestinian art practices: from venues like the Berlin Biennale, to annual poster competitions, to the monumental skeleton key sculpture known as the ‘Gate of Return’ that is installed at the entrance to the West Bank Palestinian community of Aida. To enter Aida through the ‘Gate of Return’, one passes through a keyhole-shaped structure atop of which is mounted a giant house key. All of these practices remove the key from the context of the familial and domestic, and place it instead in a public and communal context of loss and hope for return. In Palestine, as in Crimea, the house key becomes an amulet that braces against the destruction of memory and provokes stories about the lost home. These Palestinian stories reminded me of what I had once heard from Crimean Tatars and prompted me — a US-based researcher who has not visited Crimea since 2015 — not to overlook the symbolic potency of an otherwise mundane object.
What began as a simple observation about how house keys signify in these disparate narratives of exile is suggestive of something which I think might be best characterised as a shared ethos of refusal: the refusal to forget, the refusal to be narrated out from the triumphant histories written by more powerful actors, the refusal to consent to elimination. Settler colonialism, according to the prominent theorist, Patrick Wolfe, becomes silently infrastructural. It bets against the displaced and the conquered, assuming they will eventually forget about the injustice of their occupation and submit to an inexorable ‘logic of elimination’ — either through outright extermination or the less ostentatiously violent practices of coercive assimilation. The house keys held in exile endure as reminders of the ongoing pursuit of justice from Crimea to Palestine and beyond.
In territories of Ukraine riven by Russian aggression since 2014, a new archive of stories about house keys is taking form. The formerly Kharkiv-based psychologist, Valentyna Pavlenko, recently wrote about how the full-scale invasion transformed her keys into objects that ‘now prompt a swarm of memories and emotions… My keys were previously just an instrument to open the door. Now when I see them in my purse, they symbolize the impossibility of returning home, of returning to a longed for, dreamed of, peaceful life.’[3] Personal and collective stories about house keys have appeared in a range of artistic contexts. The artist Diana Berg is pictured holding two sets of keys in an April 2022 interview about her double displacement from Donetsk to Mariupol to Lviv and the yet-untold horrors of Russian occupation. House keys feature in photographer Alena Grom’s 2017 unfinished project about fleeing Donetsk titled, simply, Keys. Artist Dima Kozakov exhibited a collection of keys left to him by friends fleeing the full-scale invasion in his 2023 installation House. Keys hold great significance for the celebrated writer, Olena Stiazhkina. She discloses in a recent interview how the 2022 occupation of Mariupol prompted her to finally remove from her handbag the house keys to her Donetsk home, which she fled in 2014. She decided to treat them instead as a small art installation.
Stiazhkina describes how placing her Donetsk house keys alongside the keys of others at the door of her Kyiv apartment was ‘a small gesture, an act of solidarity with those people whose grief is certainly greater than my childish attachment to the keys’. Diminishing the significance of the keys as personal mementos of loss and hoped-for return, Stiazhkina recontextualises them as collective objects that obstinately reject Russian occupation. She follows her story about keys with a statement about her absolute conviction that all Russian-occupied territories, including her own, will be returned to Ukrainians. Her Donetsk keys, which she ‘greets daily’, have become an amulet, preserving her faith that eventually justice will be served: ‘that these will be our cities and that we will return there’. In all of these divergent contexts, the house key stands in for the security of feeling at home and safe in the world. As these stories age and get retold, they often come to symbolise the hope that one day the house keys will help restore some version of the lost home and rebalance the scales of justice.
During a June 2025 public conversation on justice and time held in Lviv, the international lawyer and writer, Philippe Sands, spoke about distinct yet overlapping categories of justice. Sands argued for forms of justice in but also beyond the criminal arena, where trials may lead to convictions and sentences, but where outcomes can be elusive or painfully slow to arrive. Sands noted that justice is very connected to storytelling, and therefore that literature, writing, films, visual art, and music have a big part to play in elucidating paths to justice.[4] The amulet against elimination that is the house key is the material that precedes the story; it triggers a story’s telling and retelling, it forbids us to forget for long.
Stories may seem like weak weapons against the militarised violence of occupation and dispossession. Yet what Edward Said, speaking to the Palestinian context, once described as ‘the permission to narrate’ is a central concern that weaves through scholarly disciplines from North American Indigenous studies to postcolonial theory. Who has the permission to narrate their own story? In contemporary Indigenous scholarly and activist circles, storytelling is sometimes referred to as ‘storywork’, marking it as a legitimate, serious practice. Storywork aims to rebalance the narrative asymmetries and biases passed down by generations of the powerful, while emphasising the diverse and creative ways in which stories are kept alive: to record history, cosmology, law, memory, expressive practices, kinship networks, and more. There is power in the stories that refuse to be forgotten.
Crimean Tatars, like Palestinians, like Ukrainian citizens under Russian occupation or military attack, are people who refuse to consent to their own elimination. They may hold on to their house keys — to their stories and their songs and their memories — as amulets against the powerful tide of forgetting. These amulets hold the promise of a future secured against elimination. They harbour a faith in justice. Their resonance across time and place activates us to pay attention, or, as in my case, to remember the stories with which I had once been entrusted. These amulets should motivate us to build new archives of stories so that those stories can be retold — in books that will be published and artworks made, and in war crimes tribunals that will one day be held.
As ongoing processes of settler domination expand in Crimea, in Palestine, and in the occupied territories of Ukraine, everyday objects like house keys will accrue ever more meaning and symbolic power. There are new stories, painful and hopeful ones, being produced now. Let these stories remind us that even as geopolitical machinations and neoimperial rivalries cleave people apart, common experiences of dispossession link people together. The simple object’s stubborn materiality should not be underestimated; it thwarts and exposes the grinding wheels of settler elimination and its attack on memory. The house key signifies the refusal to be forgotten and the insistence on an eventual turn towards justice, here and there — in 1944, 1948, 2014, 2022, today, and tomorrow.
The author wishes to thank Emine Ziyatdin for comments on an earlier version of this essay. Any omissions or errors are solely the author’s responsibility.
Endnotes
[1] Martin-Oleksandr Kisly, ‘Povernennia Krymskykh Tatar na Batkivshchynu u 1956–1989 rr. [Crimean Tatars’ Return to their Homeland between 1956–89]’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, 2021), 183 n. 73.
[2] Dima Saad, ‘Materializing Palestinian Memory: Objects of Home and the Everyday Externalities of Exile’, Jerusalem Quarterly, 80 (2019), p. 57–71, doi:10.70190/jq.I80.p57.
[3] Valentyna Pavlenko, ‘The Emotional and Behavioral Consequences after the Russian Invasion of Ukraine for the Civilian Population of Ukraine’, in Dispossession: Anthropological Perspectives on Russia’s War Against Ukraine, ed. by Catherine Wanner (Routledge, 2024), pp. 45–62 (p. 56), doi:10.4324/9781003382607.
[4] Editor’s note: One can link Philippe Sands’s ideas about storytelling as a form of justice to his conversation with the Ukrainian writer and war crimes researcher, Victoria Amelina, which took place during the 2022 Lviv BookForum. The conversation is reproduced in Victoria Amelina’s posthumously published book Looking at Women Looking at War: A War & Justice Diary (St Martin’s Press, 2025); see pages 207–31.
Maria Sonevytsky is the author of Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine (2019), Vopli Vidopliassova’s Tantsi (2023), and over a dozen scholarly articles and book chapters on topics ranging from epistemic imperialism, to post-Chornobyl disaster folklore, to the musical cultures of Young Pioneers in Soviet Kyiv, to Crimean Tatar music and the politics of Indigenous memory. She has produced a number of multimedia projects, including The Chornobyl Songs Project: Living Culture from a Lost World, and has written for outlets such as Pitchfork, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and various symphony orchestras. She teaches Anthropology and Music at Bard College in the Hudson Valley of New York. Sonevytsky is also a singer and accordionist.
Image: Sevilâ Nariman-qızı, cebimde ev (home in a pocket) from the series menim – seniñ (mine – yours), 2025
