Section
Culture & History
Food, music, literature and crafts: Ukrainian culture and the history behind it.
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A Song, a Film, a Festival, a Holiday: 56 Years of “Chervona Ruta”
Composer Volodymyr Ivasiuk's song "Chervona Ruta" was first broadcast on a Chernivtsi television program in September 1970. In 1971 a musical film of the same name was made, and in 1989 a music festival named after the song began in Chernivtsi. In May 2026 Ukraine's parliament established a "Day of Ukrainian Music" tied to the festival's dates.
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“Idleness Is the Mother of All”: Monomakh’s Instruction to His Children
Volodymyr Monomakh, 12th-century grand prince of Kyiv, left his children a text combining moral instruction with a record of his own travels and hunts. It survives in only one manuscript, the Laurentian Codex of 1377, and was first published in 1793. This article compares theories of when it was written and where it sits within the manuscript, drawing on encyclopedias and a critical edition.
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1661, or 1784? When Lviv University Actually Began
Lviv University dates its founding to 1661, when a Polish king granted a Jesuit college "the dignity of a university." The Canadian Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine instead dates it to 1784, when an Austrian emperor opened it. This article lays out what each of those two years actually involved, and traces the shifting name and language of instruction, drawing on encyclopedias and the university's own history.
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Did Yurii Kulchytsky Open Vienna’s First Coffee House?
Yurii-Frants Kulchytsky, a merchant from Galicia who carried messages during the 1683 Siege of Vienna, is credited in Ukrainian encyclopedias with opening Vienna's first coffee house. But Vienna's own city history wiki calls that a legend, saying the first coffee-serving privilege in 1685 went to an Armenian, Deodato. This article lays three sources side by side.
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1654, the Year Kharkiv Was Born: Japan’s Jōō 3
Kharkiv's founding is usually dated to 1654. That year, Cossacks who had settled at the edge of the steppe built a fort where two rivers meet, and the town later became the center of a Cossack regiment. The same year in Edo, the Tamagawa Aqueduct was completed, and the monk Yinyuan arrived in Nagasaki. This article lines up events in both places on one timeline and looks, source by source, at what “1654” actually counts.
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1883: Ismail Gasprinsky Publishes the Newspaper Tercuman
On April 10, 1883, the first issue of the newspaper Tercuman appeared in Bakhchysarai, Crimea, published by Ismail Gasprinsky. Its Crimean Tatar- and Russian-language pages were read across the Russian Empire's Turkic peoples and were tied to a movement to reform schools. This article looks, source by source, at his two names, the year the paper ended, and even a claimed Nobel Prize nomination.
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A Sound That Carries 10 Kilometers: the Carpathian Wooden Horn Trembita
A spruce trunk split, hollowed out, and wound with birch bark: the trembita, a horn 1 to 3 meters long, announced death and weddings in the Carpathian mountains, and a 2012 survey still recorded a player walking at the rear of funeral processions to sound it. This article draws on encyclopedias and field research to look at how it is made, what it has announced, and what lies behind calling it "the world's longest instrument."
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The Nativity Above, Comedy Below: The Two-Level Puppet Theatre Vertep
On the upper level, the Nativity of Christ and King Herod; on the lower level, comic scenes of peasants, soldiers, and a Zaporozhian Cossack. This article draws on Ukrainian and Canadian encyclopedias to trace the stage and characters of Ukraine's vertep puppet theatre, the encyclopedias' differing accounts of when it began, the surviving scripts, and the "living vertep" of the 20th century.
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Three Cossacks Who Barely Speak: The Animated Series Cossacks
Hrai, Oko, and Tur, three Cossacks, boil kulish, play football, and rescue brides. This article draws on the Dovzhenko Centre's records and encyclopedias to trace the filmography of director Volodymyr Dakhno's animated series Cossacks (Yak kozaky…), which began at a Kyiv studio in 1967: the conflicting episode count and final year given by different sources, the wording preserved in editing logs, and the studio's changing names.
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The Gangster Benya Krik, of Moldavanka: Babel’s Odessa Tales
The gangster boss Benya Krik moves through the back streets of early-20th-century Odesa. This article draws on Ukrainian encyclopedias and YIVO's encyclopedia of Eastern European Jewish history to trace how Odesa-born Isaac Babel's story cycle Odessa Tales, written in Russian, took shape: the district of Moldavanka where it is set, the man said to be the model for its hero, its film adaptations, and its Japanese translation.