The Nativity Above, Comedy Below: The Two-Level Puppet Theatre Vertep

A two-story wooden box. On the upper level, an angel announces the birth of the Savior to shepherds, and King Herod gives orders to his soldiers. On the lower level, a tavern keeper, soldiers, a Roma man, and an elderly peasant couple appear one after another and cause a commotion, until finally a Zaporozhian Cossack steals the show. This is vertep (вертеп), the Ukrainian puppet theatre that traveled from village to village and town to town during the Christmas season.

What follows is based on three Ukrainian and Canadian encyclopedias — the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (IEU, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta), the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine (ESU, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and others), and the Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine (Institute of History, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine) — as of September 2026.

A Stage Split Into Two Levels

ESU describes the vertep as a “two-level wooden box (2×1 m).” A groove was cut into the floor of each level, and the puppeteer (вертепник, vertepnyk) moved the puppets along it with wires. According to IEU, one person usually operated all of the puppets, and the number of characters could run from 10 to 40.

The word “vertep” refers both to the puppet performance itself and to the box-shaped stage on which it was performed. The Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine divides the meaning of the word into three: “an old Ukrainian folk puppet theatre,” “a two-story, house-shaped puppet stage,” and “its performance.”

The Upper Level: the Nativity Story

ESU describes the religious drama of the upper level as having the shape of a proper play. The sexton lighting a candle and ringing a bell is the prologue; an angel appearing before the shepherds and the shepherds praising Christ is the introduction; the scene in which King Herod gives orders to his soldiers sets the plot moving; the scene of Rachel, the mother whose child is taken, is the climax; and Herod’s death is the resolution. Between scenes came choral pieces called “kant,” which explained events or foretold them. ESU writes that the first kant of the upper level served as a kind of choral overture, and that a kant titled “Under the Cherry Tree” (Ой під вишнею) served to shift the action from the upper level down to the lower level.

The Lower Level: Interchangeable Comic Scenes

The secular drama of the lower level was a string of short comic scenes with almost no connection to one another. According to ESU, scenes could be swapped, dropped, or replaced with others, which left the play open to improvisation and change. The characters who appear are familiar figures from folk songs and pairs of men and women of various ethnicities, each speaking in their own language (ESU states the base language was Ukrainian) or jargon, and exaggerating their habits, faith, and preferences. ESU explains that this cast of characters mirrored the makeup of Ukrainian society at the time, along with its customs and prejudices.

The figure who tied together many of the lower level’s scenes was the Zaporozhian Cossack (Запорожець, Zaporozhets). ESU calls him the hero the common people loved most. According to IEU, the secular scenes often incorporated current events of the time; for instance, the puppet of the Zaporozhian Cossack appeared during the reign of Catherine II. That verses were added to this Cossack’s monologue and written into the lower part of the folk painting “Kozak Mamai” is covered in the article on the folk painting “Kozak Mamai.”

How Far Back Does It Go?

The encyclopedias differ on when it began.

• IEU: performances of vertep go back to the end of the 16th century.
• ESU: the earliest record of traveling with puppets dates to 1573.
• Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine: vertep performances probably arose in the latter half of the 17th century.

On the other hand, both IEU and ESU agree that its peak came in the latter half of the 18th century. ESU links this flourishing to the spread of plays performed in schools, especially the short comic pieces (intermedia) performed between the acts.

Students of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy

IEU writes that many students of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy were involved in the vertep’s development, and that the division of the performance into two parts partly reflects the dramatic forms taught at the Academy. IEU also writes that itinerant church choristers helped spread the vertep. The Great Ukrainian Encyclopedia (VUE, the state encyclopedia’s electronic edition) states that vertep gained popularity in Kyiv thanks to the Academy’s teachers and students, and that the most complete surviving script was taken down from students of a Kyiv seminary who traveled from place to place with a vertep. The history of the Academy itself is covered in the article on the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.

Surviving Scripts

ESU lists the following as known types of Ukrainian vertep. Of these, the music has also survived for the Sokyryntsi, Slavutyn, and Baturyn vertep, while fragments remain of the other types as well.

The best known is the type handed down in the village of Sokyryntsi, in what is now Chernihiv oblast, owned by the landowning Galagan family. The Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine states that the Sokyryntsi script is among the vertep scripts of the late 18th century that survive to this day, and names Mykola Markevych, Hryhorii Galagan, and Yevhen Markovsky among those who published such scripts. Galagan’s article “The Vertep of Little Russia” (Малорусский вертеп) appeared in the journal Kievskaya Starina in 1882.

However, sources disagree on dates. Where ESU dates the Sokyryntsi script to 1771, IEU’s entry “Sokyryntsi” gives 1781 for when a vertep puppet theatre was established on the Galagan family’s estate. VUE describes the oldest surviving vertep box from the Chernihiv region, which belonged to the Galagan family, as dating from “the 1770s.”

IEU names Sokyryntsi, Baturyn, and Mezhyhirya (in what is now Zakarpattia oblast) as representative examples among village vertep. As basic reference works on the subject, both IEU and ESU cite Yevhen Markovsky’s Ukrainian Vertep: Studies and Scripts (1929) and Yosyp Fedas’s The Folk Vertep of Ukraine (1987).

Nearly Lost, Then Revived

IEU states that the vertep puppet theatre declined in the mid-19th century, while the Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine states that it continued into the early 20th century. According to IEU, the vertep went on living as a symbol even after that — in small Nativity models displayed in homes during the Christmas season, and in people dressed as vertep characters who go singing from house to house. IEU’s entry “Christmas” writes that a puppet vertep sometimes accompanies people as they go from house to house singing koliadky. Koliadky themselves are covered in the article on Ukrainian Christmas.

In the 20th century it returned to the stage as a “living vertep” (живий вертеп), performed by actors rather than puppets. ESU gives the following examples.

• In 1918, Les Kurbas’s “Young Theatre” (Молодий театр) in Kyiv staged a living vertep. IEU’s entry “Molodyi Teatr” also mentions a stylized “vertep” using the conventions of puppet theatre
• From 1923 to 1929, the Mezhyhirya School of Art Ceramics near Kyiv had a “Mezhyhirya vertep” on topical, political themes. According to ESU, Red Army soldiers, the Russian Tsar Nicholas, and the German Kaiser Wilhelm appeared, performing anti-religious propaganda skits
• In 1975, the Kharkiv Puppet Theatre staged a “Ukrainian Vertep” using the principles of the traditional vertep. In 1985, the Kyiv Puppet Theatre used the same approach to stage Kotliarevsky’s Eneida
• From the late 1980s into the early 1990s, a movement began to revive the tradition of vertep in everyday life, and from 1989, a vertep festival began to be held at Kyiv’s International Center for Culture and Arts

According to ESU, the collection of vertep boxes and puppets is held by the Ukrainian Museum of Theatre, Music, and Cinema Arts.

As of this writing, the National List of Elements of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Ukraine, as far as it has been added to under Ministry of Culture Order No. 700 of June 23, 2026, contains no entry under the name vertep. The list does include other entries related to winter celebrations, such as the making of Christmas stars and the custom of going house to house singing Christmas carols.