On the broad, fertile plains of eastern Europe, where the black earth gives some of the richest harvests on the continent, lives one of Europe’s great nations: the Ukrainians. Heirs to the medieval splendour of Kyivan Rus and to the free warriors of the Cossack steppe, famed for their embroidery, their song, and their painted Easter eggs, they are a people whose identity has been forged and defended through a thousand years of glory and suffering.
This account follows the Ukrainians from their origins in Kyivan Rus through their language, their homeland of steppe, river and mountain, the old world of the village, their society, their Orthodox faith, their traditions, crafts, food, and the great festivals of Easter and Christmas, to the independent modern nation and the wide diaspora that together carry an identity proved unbreakable.
Ukraine on Film
Contents
- Origins of the Ukrainians, Heirs of Kyivan Rus
- What It Means to Be Ukrainian
- The Ukrainian Language and Its Long Defence
- A Homeland of Steppe, River and Mountain
- Old Ways of the Ukrainian Village
- Family, Village and the Ukrainian Nation
- Orthodox Faith at the Heart of Ukraine
- Embroidery, the Hopak and Ukrainian Tradition
- Pysanky, Embroidery and Ukrainian Handwork
- Borscht, Bread and the Ukrainian Table
- Easter, Christmas and the Ukrainian Year
- A History of Cossacks, Empires and Independence
- The Ukrainians in the Present Day
Origins of the Ukrainians, Heirs of Kyivan Rus
On the broad plains and river valleys of eastern Europe, between the forests of the north and the warm shores of the Black Sea, lives one of the great Slavic nations: the Ukrainians. Their roots reach back more than a thousand years, to the medieval state of Kyivan Rus, whose capital, Kyiv, stood among the most brilliant cities of its age and gave the East Slavs their first great civilisation.
It was in Kyiv, on the banks of the Dnipro, that the East Slavic peoples were baptised into Christianity and built the golden-domed cathedrals, such as Saint Sophia, that still crown the city. From this Kyivan world descend the Ukrainians, who see in Rus the foundation of their nation, its faith, its letters, and its art.
After the fall of Kyivan Rus to the Mongol invasions, the lands of Ukraine passed under the rule of many powers, Lithuanian, Polish, Ottoman, and Russian, yet the people endured, and a distinct Ukrainian nation slowly took shape, above all in the frontier world of the steppe and the free Cossacks who rose there.
From these deep roots, in Kyivan Rus and in the Cossack frontier, emerged a people with a strong sense of their own identity, language, and history, distinct from their Russian and Polish neighbours. The Ukrainians grew into one of the largest nations of Europe, bound to a land they have defended, again and again, at terrible cost.
What It Means to Be Ukrainian
The people are the Ukrainians, and their land is Ukraine, a name long understood to mean the borderland or the country, the land at the edge of the settled world where forest met the open steppe. To be Ukrainian is to belong to this nation of eastern Europe, with its own language, faith, and unbroken sense of itself.
Ukrainian identity is expressed through powerful and beloved symbols: the embroidered shirt known as the vyshyvanka, worn with pride across the nation and its diaspora; the blue and yellow of the sky above and the ripening wheat below; and the golden domes of Kyiv. These have become the badges of a proud people.
For much of their history the Ukrainians lived under the rule of others, and their very name and nationhood were at times denied or suppressed. Yet the sense of being Ukrainian, carried in language, song, faith, and memory, never died, and in modern times it has burst forth with extraordinary force and unity.
Wherever Ukrainians have settled, from the villages of the homeland to the great diaspora in North America and beyond, the name and its symbols bind them together. To claim the name Ukrainian, especially in an age when the nation’s survival has been so hard-won, is an act of deep pride and belonging.
The Ukrainian Language and Its Long Defence
The Ukrainian language is an East Slavic tongue, written in the Cyrillic alphabet and closely related to Belarusian and Russian, yet fully distinct, with its own sound, vocabulary, and a rich literature of its own. It is the mother tongue of the nation and one of the deepest expressions of Ukrainian identity.
Ukrainian is famous for its musicality and for the vast treasury of folk song carried in it, and it flowered in the nineteenth century in the work of writers and poets, above all Taras Shevchenko, whose verse gave the nation a voice and made the language a banner of Ukrainian awakening and freedom.
Through long periods of foreign rule the Ukrainian language was discouraged, restricted, and at times banned outright, dismissed as a mere dialect in an effort to erase Ukrainian nationhood. That the language survived, spoken in the villages and cherished by the nation’s writers, is itself a triumph of Ukrainian endurance.
Today Ukrainian is the official language of an independent state, spoken with new confidence and pride across the country, its use a powerful assertion of national identity. Its survival and revival, against centuries of pressure, stand among the central stories of the Ukrainian people.
A Homeland of Steppe, River and Mountain
The homeland of the Ukrainians is a broad and fertile country stretching across eastern Europe, famous above all for its steppe, the vast open grassland whose deep black soil, the chornozem, is among the richest farmland on earth and made Ukraine long known as the breadbasket of Europe.
Through this land run great rivers, above all the Dnipro, which flows through the heart of the country and through Kyiv itself, a river woven deep into Ukrainian history, song, and identity. The rivers and the steppe together shaped a nation of farmers and, on the frontier, of Cossack horsemen.
To the west rise the Carpathian Mountains, a world of forested slopes, highland pastures, and distinct mountain peoples such as the Hutsuls, who keep their own vivid traditions. To the south lie the warm shores of the Black Sea. From mountain to steppe to sea, Ukraine is a land of great variety.
The wealth of the black earth and the openness of the steppe have made Ukraine both a place of plenty and a land fought over by empires for centuries. The Ukrainians’ deep bond with their fertile homeland, its wheat fields, its rivers, and its wide horizons, runs through their culture and their fierce determination to hold it.
Old Ways of the Ukrainian Village
The old life of the Ukrainians was overwhelmingly that of the village, built on the tilling of the rich black soil. In whitewashed cottages known as the khata, roofed with thatch and set among orchards and gardens, generations of Ukrainian peasants lived by the growing of wheat, rye, and other grains, and the keeping of livestock.
The farming year set the rhythm of village life, from the spring sowing to the great labour of the harvest, and the community shared in the tasks and the celebrations that marked the seasons. The village, with its church, its customs, and its close bonds of kin and neighbour, was the whole world of the traditional Ukrainian.
Around the home and the hearth clustered a rich domestic culture: the embroidering of shirts and cloths, the painting of Easter eggs, the weaving and the baking, and the singing that accompanied every task and gathering. The Ukrainian village was poor in goods but astonishingly rich in song, craft, and custom.
This old peasant world, bound to the land and the seasons, nurtured the songs, embroidery, foods, and festivals that remain the core of Ukrainian culture. Though transformed by the upheavals of the modern age, the image of the village, the khata, and the wheat field remains central to how Ukrainians picture their nation.
Family, Village and the Ukrainian Nation
Ukrainian society was built on the family, the village community, and, above all in modern times, the nation. In the traditional village the extended family and the tight bonds of the community framed life, and values of hard work, hospitality, and attachment to the land ran deep among a people rooted in the soil.
Across the centuries of foreign rule, the Ukrainians largely remained a nation of peasants and villagers, their nobility often absorbed by the ruling powers, so that the people themselves, their language, faith, and folk culture, became the vessel of the nation. From this arose a strong, egalitarian, popular sense of Ukrainian identity.
The frontier heritage of the Cossacks, free warriors of the steppe who governed themselves and elected their leaders, gave Ukrainians a powerful tradition of freedom and self-organisation that they cherish as central to their character. This spirit of independence and community has surged again in the nation’s modern struggles.
Whether in the village, the city, or the vast diaspora, Ukrainians have recreated the bonds of family, faith, and national fellowship. In recent times the whole nation has shown an extraordinary capacity to come together in defence of its freedom, revealing how deep the ties of Ukrainian society run.
Orthodox Faith at the Heart of Ukraine
Christianity has been central to Ukrainian identity since the baptism of Kyivan Rus more than a thousand years ago, an event that made Kyiv one of the great centres of Eastern Christianity. The golden-domed cathedrals of the capital, above all Saint Sophia and Saint Volodymyr’s, stand as enduring symbols of this ancient faith.
The great majority of Ukrainians belong to the Eastern Orthodox tradition, with its rich liturgy, its icons, and its calendar of feasts, though in the west of the country many belong to the Greek Catholic Church, which keeps the Eastern rite while in communion with Rome. Faith has long been woven into national life.
Religious observance shaped the Ukrainian year and the customs of the people, from the great feasts of Easter and Christmas to the blessing of the fields and the rites of birth, marriage, and death. Around the church clustered the community, its festivals, and much of its music and art.
Through periods when religion was suppressed, above all under Soviet rule, the faith endured and has revived strongly in independent Ukraine, where the Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches remain important to national life and identity. The golden domes of Kyiv still proclaim the deep Christian heritage of the Ukrainians.
Embroidery, the Hopak and Ukrainian Tradition
The traditions of the Ukrainians are among the richest and most colourful in Europe, and foremost among them is embroidery. The vyshyvanka, the embroidered shirt, worked in intricate red and black or many-coloured patterns that vary by region, is the nation’s most cherished symbol, worn at celebrations and on the special day devoted to it.
Music and dance run deep in Ukrainian tradition. The nation is famous for its folk songs, sung in a language admired for its musicality, and for its dances, above all the hopak, the fast, leaping, acrobatic dance of the Cossack tradition that has become the national dance and a spectacle known around the world.
The painting of Easter eggs, the pysanky, is a distinctively Ukrainian art, in which eggs are decorated with wax and dye in dazzling geometric and symbolic patterns, an ancient custom tied to the coming of spring and the feast of Easter and treasured as a national craft.
These traditions come most alive at the festivals and celebrations of the Ukrainian year, and they are carried with special devotion by the diaspora abroad. In keeping the vyshyvanka, the hopak, the pysanka, and the folk song, the Ukrainians maintain a heritage that binds the nation across every border.
Pysanky, Embroidery and Ukrainian Handwork
Ukrainian craft is expressed above all in the arts of the home and the celebration. The embroidery of shirts, towels, and cloths, worked in the patterns proper to each region, is the greatest of these, a skill passed from mother to daughter that produced the vyshyvanka and the ritual cloths used at every important moment of life.
The pysanka, the wax-resist painted Easter egg, is a craft of extraordinary refinement, its patterns rich with ancient symbols of the sun, the stars, plants, and animals. Made especially at Eastertime, the pysanky are among the most beautiful and distinctive products of Ukrainian folk art.
Ukrainian craft also embraced pottery, weaving, and woodwork, and the making of the ritual breads, above all the elaborate wedding bread known as the korovai, baked and decorated with great skill. The regions of Ukraine, from the Carpathian Hutsuls to the potters of Poltava, each kept their own signature arts.
Whether in the embroidered shirt, the painted egg, the woven cloth, or the decorated bread, Ukrainian craft expresses a people with a deep love of pattern, colour, and symbol. These handmade treasures, tied to faith, family, and the seasons, remain a living emblem of the nation and its culture.
Borscht, Bread and the Ukrainian Table
Ukrainian food is the hearty, generous fare of a rich farming land, built on grain, vegetables, and the produce of the garden and the farm. Bread holds a place of honour, and the black earth’s abundance gave the nation a cuisine famed for its variety and its warmth.
The national dish is borscht, the beetroot soup, deep red and richly flavoured, made in countless regional versions and served with soured cream and bread; it is so central to Ukrainian life that it stands almost as a symbol of the nation. Beside it come the beloved varenyky, dumplings filled with potato, cheese, cabbage, or fruit.
The Ukrainian table overflows with the produce of the land: cabbage and beetroot, potatoes and mushrooms, pork and poultry, and the dairy of the farm, along with holubtsi of stuffed cabbage, salo of cured pork fat, and a wealth of pickles and preserves laid up for the winter.
Food is bound up with hospitality, faith, and celebration, and the great feasts of the year each have their special dishes, above all the ritual foods of Easter and the twelve meatless dishes of Christmas Eve. To share bread and borscht, in the Ukrainian way, is to share in the warmth and generosity of the nation.
Easter, Christmas and the Ukrainian Year
The festivals of the Ukrainians follow the Christian year, and among the greatest is Easter, celebrated with special splendour: the baking of the tall sweet bread called paska, the painting of pysanky, and the blessing of festive baskets in church, all marking the central feast of the Orthodox year with deep joy.
Christmas, kept according to the old calendar in much of the country, is marked by the solemn and beautiful Christmas Eve supper of twelve meatless dishes, by carol-singing, and by the folk drama of the vertep, a nativity play carried from house to house, in one of the richest of Ukrainian celebrations.
Older, pre-Christian customs survive in festivals such as Ivana Kupala, the midsummer celebration of fire and water, with its bonfires, wreaths floated on the rivers, and songs, an ancient rite of the summer solstice kept alive in the villages and revived across the nation.
In modern times the nation has also embraced the special day of the vyshyvanka, when Ukrainians everywhere wear the embroidered shirt in a great shared celebration of identity. Through all these festivals, old and new, the Ukrainians affirm their faith, their heritage, and their unbreakable sense of themselves.
A History of Cossacks, Empires and Independence
The history of the Ukrainians begins in the glory of Kyivan Rus and its fall to the Mongols, after which the Ukrainian lands were divided among Lithuania, Poland, and other powers. Out of the frontier struggles of the steppe rose the Cossacks, free warriors who built their own self-governing society and became the enduring symbol of Ukrainian freedom.
The great Cossack uprising of the seventeenth century under Bohdan Khmelnytsky created a Ukrainian state, but it was drawn into the orbit of Moscow, and over the following centuries most of Ukraine came under the Russian Empire, its nationhood and language suppressed even as the sense of a distinct Ukrainian people grew.
The twentieth century brought catastrophe and struggle: a brief independence crushed after the First World War, and above all the Holodomor, the terrible man-made famine of the 1930s in which millions of Ukrainians perished, a wound that lies at the heart of the nation’s memory, followed by the devastation of the Second World War.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine at last won its independence, and in the decades since, the Ukrainians have defended and deepened their freedom through popular uprisings and, in the face of invasion, through a struggle for national survival that has drawn the admiration of the world. Their history is one of endurance against overwhelming odds.
The Ukrainians in the Present Day
Today the Ukrainians are an independent European nation of many millions, with a strong and unmistakable sense of their own identity, language, and destiny. Their capital, Kyiv, ancient and golden-domed yet thoroughly modern, stands again as the centre of a sovereign Ukrainian state after centuries of foreign rule.
Modern Ukraine is a country of great cities, rich farmland, and a lively culture, and in recent years the nation has shown the world an extraordinary unity and courage in defence of its freedom and its right to exist as a distinct people. This struggle has deepened and intensified the sense of Ukrainian identity.
The traditions flourish with new pride: the vyshyvanka is worn as never before, the Ukrainian language is spoken with confidence, and the songs, dances, crafts, and festivals of the nation are cherished as vital expressions of a hard-won freedom. Ukrainian culture has drawn the attention and sympathy of the world.
Beyond the homeland, a large and active Ukrainian diaspora keeps the nation’s heritage alive across the globe, from Canada to the wider world, bound to the homeland by language, faith, and love of country. Between the resilient nation at home and its diaspora abroad, the Ukrainians stand as a people whose identity and spirit have proved unbreakable.
One thought on “Ukrainians of the Black Earth, a Slavic Nation Heir to Kyivan Rus”