Is the Sunflower Ukraine’s National Flower? A Flower From the 18th Century and the Kalyna of Song

Ukraine has no “national flower” set by law. The national symbols that Article 20 of the Constitution establishes are three: the flag, the coat of arms, and the anthem. English-language reports sometimes call the sunflower “Ukraine’s national flower,” and in Japanese too one finds texts that present it as the national flower, but this is not a legal designation.

Even so, the sunflower and the kalyna (калина) are widely used as plants that stand for Ukraine. The sunflower is a field crop that came to Ukraine in the 18th century, and the kalyna is a tree that has long been sung about in folk songs. We look at how the two became symbols through encyclopedias and records (as of October 2026).

Ukraine’s National Flower Is Not Set by Law

Article 20 of the Constitution of Ukraine, adopted in 1996, begins with the following sentence.

Державними символами України є Державний Прапор України, Державний Герб України і Державний Гімн України.
(The state symbols of Ukraine are the State Flag of Ukraine, the State Coat of Arms of Ukraine, and the State Anthem of Ukraine.)

Constitution of Ukraine, Article 20, first part. English translation by this article

The article then goes on to set the colors of the flag, the Great and Small Coats of Arms, how the music and words of the anthem are to be decided, and that the capital is Kyiv. Flowers, trees, and birds do not appear. How the three symbols came to be decided is covered in our article on the flag, coat of arms, and anthem, and the relation between the law and texts that call the kalyna and the stork a “national flower” and a “national bird” is covered in our article on rendering the names of plants and animals in Japanese.

On the other hand, news reports have called the sunflower the “national flower” from early on. On February 25, 2022, the US news site The Daily Beast wrote of “sunflower seeds, the national flower of Ukraine,” and a Business Insider article that the South China Morning Post republished on March 1 wrote that “Sunflowers were already Ukraine’s national flower”. None of these articles, however, shows what made it the national flower.

The Sunflower Is a Field Crop That Arrived in the 18th Century

The sunflower is not a plant that grew in Ukraine from the beginning. The entry “Oil plants” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (IEU) of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) at the University of Alberta (first published in volume 3 of the 1993 print edition) says that the oldest oil plants in Ukraine are flax and hemp, that the sunflower and mustard arrived in the 18th century, and that false flax and rape arrived in the 19th century.

The same entry says that in 1987 1.75 million hectares of fields were used for the three crops of sunflower, flax, and hemp. The IEU entry “Steppe” lists the sunflower among the important industrial crops of the steppe zone, and the entry “Traditional foods” records roasted sunflower seeds and sunflower oil used in cooking as part of the everyday table.

Today’s sunflower seed harvest is summed up in our article on the three major crops, and the oil and export duties in our article on sunflower oil. Fields full of sunflowers became a familiar sight along with this spread of agriculture.

The Kalyna Is the Tree That Stands for a Girl in Folk Songs

The kalyna is a tree of the genus Viburnum with the scientific name Viburnum opulus, called セイヨウカンボク (seiyō-kanboku) in Japanese. The IEU entry “Flora” lists this tree as part of the undergrowth of ravine forests in the forest-steppe zone. It bears red berries in autumn.

The kalyna is spoken of as a symbol first of all in folk songs. The IEU entry “Folk songs” (first published in volume 1 of the 1984 print edition) gives, as an example of symbols derived from the plant world, “the viburnum tree represents the girl, and the oak represents the boy” (the kalyna is the viburnum), and says that in songs “a girl is compared to a star, a red viburnum tree, a pine tree, and a poppy.”

An educational collection of materials published by the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv gives still other meanings. The red berries, which resemble drops of blood, have been regarded as a symbol of the blood shed by the Cossacks; in ballads about families the kalyna stands for an early death and a young man’s grave, and in Cossack ballads a flowering thicket stands for a hero’s grave.

“The Red Kalyna in the Meadow” and the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen

One of the songs that made the link between the kalyna and the nation widely known was born in the early 20th century. Its title is “Oi u luzi chervona kalyna” (Ой у лузі червона калина), meaning “Oh, the red kalyna in the meadow.”

According to the Center for Urban History’s collection, the basis of this song is a folk song about Bohdan Khmelnytskyi’s war of the mid-17th century, “Rozlylysia kruti berezhechky” (Розлилися круті бережечки). The director Stepan Charnetskyi (Степан Чарнецький, 1881–1944) took the last part of this folk song into a production of Vasyl Pachovskyi’s (Василь Пачовський) play The Sun of the Ruins (Сонце руїни) and gave it his own words beginning “Oh, the red kalyna in the meadow.” The melody was arranged by the theater conductor Mykhailo Kossak (Михайло Коссак). The IEU dates the play The Sun of the Ruins to 1911.

In 1914, when the First World War began, the person who heard the song at a performance in Stryi was Hryhorii Trukh (Григорій Трух, 1894–1959) of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, a Ukrainian volunteer unit within the Austro-Hungarian army. Trukh wrote three new stanzas, and the song came to be sung as the Riflemen’s song. The collection says that the words and melody first appeared in 1915 in the songbook Seven Songs for Soldiers (Сім пісень для вояків), published in Vienna. The Riflemen are touched on in our article on the era of the Cossacks and the two empires.

Was the Song Made in 1913 or 1914?

How the song’s date is given differs by source.

The Suspilne article says that naming Charnetskyi as the author of the Riflemen’s song is only “one of the versions” (за однією з версій). Since this is a song built on a folk song to which several people have added words, it is hard to fix a single author and a single year.

The Publisher That Took the Riflemen’s Name

According to the IEU entry “Chervona Kalyna,” in 1921 former Riflemen and former soldiers of the Ukrainian Galician Army founded in Lviv a publishing cooperative with the same name as the song, “Red Kalyna.” It published documents and memoirs of the struggle for independence of 1917–21, and also left songbooks of the Riflemen’s songs. The cooperative was closed by the Soviet authorities in 1939 and re-established in New York in 1949. The IEU entry “Songs of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen” writes that such songs were labeled “nationalistic” and banned in Soviet Ukraine, and that from the late 1980s they began to be sung widely again.

On February 28, 2022, Andrii Khlyvniuk (Андрій Хливнюк) of the band Boombox sang the first stanza of this song on St. Sophia Square in Kyiv, and the video spread around the world. Pink Floyd also released the song “Hey! Hey! Rise Up!” featuring Khlyvniuk (according to the Center for Urban History’s collection).

1996: Sunflowers Planted on a Missile Site

There is also a record of the sunflower appearing in a scene of a national event. According to the caption of a photograph published by the US Department of Defense, on June 4, 1996, near Pervomaisk (Первомайськ), US Secretary of Defense William Perry, Ukrainian Defense Minister Valeriy Shmarov, and Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev planted sunflowers on the site of a missile silo (No. 110) whose dismantling had been completed. This silo was one of the 160 Ukrainian silos that had been dismantled under the US Cooperative Threat Reduction program. How Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons is covered in our article on the period from the postwar years to the 1990s.

February 24, 2022: The Video From Henichesk

According to the Business Insider article, what made the sunflower spread as a symbol of resistance was a video posted on the first day of the full-scale invasion. On February 24, 2022, UkraineWorld posted a video of a woman in Henichesk (Генічеськ), Kherson Oblast, confronting Russian soldiers and asking them to put sunflower seeds in their pockets. The Business Insider article (republished by the South China Morning Post, March 1, 2022) conveys the woman’s words, according to the BBC’s translation, as “Take these seeds so sunflowers grow when you die here.” Business Insider writes that the video “appeared to show” such a scene. Neither report gives the woman’s name.

Timeline: How the Sunflower and the Kalyna Became Symbols

The sunflower became a symbol as a field crop, and the kalyna as a tree in songs, each by a different path. Neither is something the state set by law; both are symbols that the people who use them have chosen.