Dressed casually and with a smile on their faces, Andrii Polytskyi and Tatiana Ianchenko are no different than thousands of tourists visiting Turkey’s Mediterranean province of Antalya every year. But their story and the purpose of their visit highlight how a war can change even a simple wedding plan.
Polytksyi, a 30-year-old man from Ukraine, met 27-year-old Ianchenko from Russia before the war started raging in Ukraine, escalating tensions between their two countries to an all-time high. They were planning to get married in Ukraine but the conflict, which broke out in February, forced them to rethink. Polytskyi, who works in Poland, and Ianchenko, came up with the idea of a third destination for their wedding: Kemer, a vacation resort of Antalya, wildly popular among tourists from their countries.
Their wedding plans in Antalya were not without hurdles though. When they both failed to receive the necessary documents for marriage from their countries’ consulates in the province, they had to travel to the capital Ankara, to apply to their embassies.
Finally, on Friday, the couple managed to officiate their marriage in Kemer. In a simple wedding ceremony with a few friends, they tied the knot by answering “I do” in Turkish to the question of Kemer Mayor Necati Topaloğlu, who officiated the wedding.
The couple will spend their honeymoon in Kemer before making a final decision on which country they will live in.
“We love each other and feel happy and lucky to get married here. I love him no matter what transpires between our countries. Love will win in the end,” Ianchenko told Demirören News Agency (DHA) after the wedding.
Polytskyi said he did not care where his wife hailed from as long as they loved each other. “I hope the war will end soon and we will travel together both to Ukraine and Russia,” he said.
“You see that an Ukrainian and Russian national got married here today. It goes to show that the people of those countries do not want war. I hope they set an example and both countries stop fighting each other,” Topaloğlu said.
