Section
Culture & History
Food, music, literature and crafts: Ukrainian culture and the history behind it.
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Ukrainian-Language Distribution Certificates for Nine Miyazaki Films and Weathering With You
From 2019 to 2021, nine films by Hayao Miyazaki received cinema distribution certificates with Ukrainian-language audio. Weathering With You is recorded as “dubbed,” and ONE PIECE FILM RED as “subtitled.” Drawing on the records of the State Film Agency’s certificates, the article traces how Japanese anime has reached Ukraine through cinemas, television, and video, along with how the Ukrainian titles of works have changed.
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No. 18 on the Top 100 of Ukrainian Cinema: Kyiv’s Animated Series The Adventures of Captain Vrungel
The Adventures of Captain Vrungel is a 13-episode series made in the animation department of the Kyiv studio Kyivnaukfilm. The article looks at the career of its director, Davyd Cherkaskyi, the gangster plotline the director added, the way the year of the work differs from source to source, the original book as it was translated in Japan under the title Horafuki Senchō Kōkaiki, and the Russian wordplay.
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Born in Kyiv, Headquartered in Malta: 4A Games, Maker of Metro
4A Games, the studio behind the game Metro 2033, was founded in Kyiv in 2005 and moved its headquarters to Malta in 2014. The company says that about 150 of its 200-plus people are still in Ukraine. Drawing on company announcements and news reports, the article looks at the founders who came from GSC, why the company moved to Malta, the Kyiv studio that became a separate company, the sentence passed on the author of the original novel, and the next game.
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Eleven Sherlock Holmes Games and Counting: Frogwares of Kyiv
The Kyiv game company Frogwares was founded in 2000, and its own list of games includes 11 with “Sherlock Holmes” in the title. Drawing on company announcements and news reports, the article looks at its Irish subsidiary, how the number of games changes depending on how you count, the dispute with its publisher over the rights to The Sinking City, and development since the full-scale invasion.
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From Barefoot Gen to Chi’s Sweet Home: Japanese Manga in Ukrainian
According to the publishing trade outlet Chytomo, the first Japanese manga in Ukrainian was volume 1 of Barefoot Gen in 2009. Translations licensed by Japanese publishers began to appear steadily with Chi’s Sweet Home, published in 2019 by Nasha Idea of Dnipro. The article looks at the licensing hurdles that publishers described, the number of titles in a publisher’s list, and the debate over how to write Japanese sounds in Cyrillic.
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How Ukrainian Varenyky Differ From Gyoza and Pierogi
Varenyky (вареники) are a Ukrainian dish in which a filling is wrapped in unleavened dough and boiled in water. The name comes from the verb for “to boil.” Many fillings contain no meat, such as potato, сир (curd), and cabbage, or fruit, and varenyky are served with sour cream. The article looks at how they differ from Japanese gyoza, why some regions also call them “pyrohy,” and what the name of Polish pierogi ruskie means.
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Is the Sunflower Ukraine’s National Flower? A Flower From the 18th Century and the Kalyna of Song
The state symbols set by Ukraine’s Constitution are three, the flag, the coat of arms, and the anthem, and there is no “national flower” set by law. Even so, the sunflower and the kalyna are plants that stand for Ukraine. The article follows how the two became symbols through a field crop that arrived in the 18th century, the tree that stands for a girl in folk songs, the Sich Riflemen’s song “The Red Kalyna,” a missile site in 1996, and a video from 2022.
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Gifts Under the Pillow and the Two Mykolas of Winter and Spring: St. Mykolai’s Day in Ukraine
In Ukraine, some families place a gift under a child's pillow on the night before St. Mykolai's Day. In the calendars of the two large churches, this day has been December 6 rather than December 19 since September 2023. This article looks at the legend of the 4th-century bishop, the winter and spring folk traditions, how encyclopedias differ in describing the origin of the gift-giving custom, and the relationship with Ded Moroz of the Soviet era, using encyclopedias and church calendars.
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Is Pavlovsky’s 1818 Grammar Really “the First Ukrainian Grammar”?
Oleksii Pavlovsky's Grammar of the Little Russian Dialect, published in St. Petersburg in 1818, is called by the Encyclopedia of the Ukrainian Language "the first printed grammar of the living, popular Ukrainian language" in Ukrainian linguistics. This article sets it against grammars going back to the 16th century, examines the conditions behind that "first," its title page and contents, its use of the letter і, and the wavering between "dialect" and "language" in its preface.
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The Nikita Botanical Garden, Begun on Crimea’s Southern Coast in 1812
On the southern coast of the Crimean Peninsula, east of Yalta, the Nikita Botanical Garden is a plant-research institution begun in 1812. This article traces the career of its first director, Steven, the timeline from the 19th century, when it opened schools for fruit growing and viticulture, through the Soviet period, to the independent Ukrainian Academy of Agrarian Sciences, along with the shifting names of the garden itself.