The library, on the ground floor of a nine-storey apartment block in the town centre of the Kyiv suburb, has become the locus and a symbol of a tentative recovery following the horrors of Russian occupation.

Once inside, Irpin residents jostle for seats in the area newly designated as the town's first free co-working space, sometimes spilling over into the children's books section.  

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With much of Irpin still in ruins, the library is also functioning as an alternative classroom for displaced schoolteachers, a makeshift office for psychotherapists or even a base for the town's Saint Nicholas to greet and take pictures with children. 

It is providing a touch of normalcy to a town that, because of its location in the pine forests on Kyiv's northwestern edge, bore the full force of Russia's advance on the capital in the war's first weeks. 

"As soon as the library reopened, we gave people the opportunity to recharge their phones. We gave people the opportunity to stay in warm conditions while watching the city rebuild," said Yevgenia Antonyuk of the Irpin city council. 

"What happens in the library touches all aspects of people's lives."

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