Ukrainian culture: what survives when the printing is illegal

What the empire banned and when

Ukrainian writing begins in Old Church Slavonic, used as a liturgical and literary language after the Christianisation of Kyivan Rus in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and the chronicles of that period, the Primary Chronicle above all, are its oldest surviving layer. Literary activity fell away after the Mongol invasion, revived from the fourteenth century, and was advanced in the sixteenth by the printing press. The Cossacks then popularised a new kind of epic poem, which is why so much of the early record was carried by voice and not on a page.

The modern literary language arrived late and by a single book. Ivan Kotliarevsky published Eneida in the Ukrainian vernacular in 1798, and the modern tradition is dated from it. By the 1830s a romantic literature had formed around Taras Shevchenko, a serf who became a poet and painter and who lived from 1814 to 1861. Kotliarevsky is called the father of literature in the vernacular; Shevchenko is called the father of a national revival, which is a different job.

Both were then legislated against. The Valuev Circular of 1863 banned Ukrainian in religious and educational literature. The Ems Ukaz of 1876 went much further: it outlawed Ukrainian-language publication outright, banned the import of Ukrainian texts printed abroad, and prohibited Ukrainian in theatrical productions, in public readings and in schools.

Writers had two remaining routes. They wrote in Russian, or they published in Austrian-ruled Galicia, where conditions for Ukrainian cultural work were comparatively lenient, and let the books travel east. The ban was never formally repealed. It simply stopped being enforced after the revolutions of 1917 and the Bolsheviks' arrival in power.

How the twentieth century took the writers

Soviet policy opened generously. Ukrainian was made the official language of administration and of schools, the interwar programme known as Ukrainization actively promoted it, and literature flourished in the early Soviet years, when nearly all literary trends were permitted.

The reversal came in the 1930s. Stalin made socialist realism state policy in 1932 by decree, "On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organisations", which named no language and prescribed a single permitted manner of writing. The enforcement was physical. Around 223 writers were repressed in the purges of the 1930s, many of them killed by the NKVD, and the generation destroyed that way is known in Ukraine as the Executed Renaissance.

Britannica's account of the famine of 1932 and 1933 sets that beside a wider campaign. While peasants were dying, the secret police were working through the Ukrainian political establishment and the intelligentsia, the Ukrainization policy was halted, and anyone connected to the Ukrainian People's Republic declared in June 1917 was liable to be publicly vilified, jailed, sent to the Gulag or executed. Mykola Skrypnyk, one of the best-known leaders of the Ukrainian Communist Party, killed himself ahead of a show trial.

Suppression returned in a quieter form after the Khrushchev Thaw. Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary from 1964 to 1982, and Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, his appointee in Kyiv, presided over an extensive Russification and over the repression of the Sixtiers, the next generation of Ukrainian intellectuals. Writers regained room in the late 1980s under glasnost, and the constraint lifted altogether with independence in 1991.

Which language Ukrainians use at home

Ukrainian is the state language under the constitution and the primary language of most of the country. About 67% of Ukrainians give Ukrainian as their first language and 30% give Russian, with Russian dominant in some eastern and southern cities and Ukrainian in the rural areas around them. Romanian is spoken in Chernivtsi Oblast and in parts of Odesa and Zakarpattia oblasts, and Hungarian is spoken in Zakarpattia. Whether Rusyn, also spoken in Zakarpattia, is a separate language or a dialect of Ukrainian is disputed among scholars; the Ukrainian government recognises it as neither a distinct language nor a distinct people.

The legal position moved three times in seven years. A law effective in August 2012 allowed any local language spoken by at least a 10% minority to be declared official in that area, and Russian was declared regional in several southern and eastern oblasts and cities within weeks. Parliament voted to repeal it in 2014, after the Revolution of Dignity, though the repeal went unsigned. In 2019 the regional-languages law was found unconstitutional. The Council of Europe has said the resulting act fails to achieve fair protection of minority linguistic rights. Ukraine's education law of 2017 bars public-school teaching above grade five in any language but Ukrainian.

War moved the private half of the question faster than any statute. A substantial part of the formerly Russian-speaking population switched to Ukrainian after the full-scale invasion, and support for giving Russian official status anywhere in the country fell to its lowest level since polling on it began in 1997.

How the ornament is made and taught

Ukrainian decorative work is regional in the strict sense: the motif places the object. Embroidery patterns, compositions, colour choices and stitches differ by area of origin, and the vyshyvanka, the embroidered shirt, is the garment that carries the difference most visibly. It has its own public celebration in May. Weaving on handmade looms is still practised at Krupove in Rivne Oblast, the Rushnyk Museum at Pereiaslav holds embroidery motifs from across the country, and the open-air Museum of Folk Architecture and Way of Life of Central Naddnipryanshchyna, in the same town, runs thirteen themed museums of vernacular building.

Two painting traditions are inscribed by UNESCO. Petrykivka decorative painting, listed in 2013, is practised in one village on the walls of living quarters, on household objects and on musical instruments, in invented flowers drawn from close observation of local plants and animals, with the rooster standing for fire and birds for light. UNESCO's file records that every family in the village has at least one practitioner and that the local schools teach it from pre-school upward. Kosiv painted ceramics, listed in 2019, began in the eighteenth century in the Hutsul Carpathians: grey clay coated in white, scratched into a contour drawing with a metal stick, then fired with metal oxides that yield the green and yellow the tradition depends on, the green spreading in the kiln into the watercolour effect the potters call tears.

The pysanka, the wax-resist Easter egg, predates the arrival of Christianity in Ukraine. Wax is drawn onto the shell, dye is applied, the waxed lines hold it off, and the wax is lifted at the end to leave the pattern. A museum devoted to the form was built at Kolomyia in the Carpathian foothills in 2000. Since 2012 the Ministry of Culture has maintained a National Register of Elements of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Ukraine, which held 115 items as of September 2025.

How the singing tradition was carried

The characteristic sound of Ukrainian folk music comes from the wide use of minor modes containing an augmented second, an interval that makes the melodies hard to mistake for those of the neighbouring traditions. The old narrative repertoire is the duma, a sung historical ballad performed with the bandura, and Cossack leaders including Mazepa, Paliy, Holovaty and Sirko were themselves players of the kobza, bandura or torban. The first dedicated music academy in the territory opened at Hlukhiv in 1738 and taught singing, violin and bandura from manuscript, which is why a striking number of the earliest composers and performers working in the Russian Empire were Ukrainians educated there.

Transmission is the fragile part. Cossack songs of the Dnipropetrovsk Region went onto UNESCO's Urgent Safeguarding list in 2016, and the reason recorded was demographic: the tradition is held by three groups, Krynycya, Boguslavochka and Pershocvit, many of whose singers were then in their seventies and eighties, learning happens inside families, and few other sources exist for a new generation to learn from. The songs are about war and about the private lives of soldiers, sung in layers, one singer who knows all the words starting, a second entering above, the rest filling the middle and lower voices. Where no men are present, women take the lower lines by deepening their voices.

The modern layer is loud and quite separate. Okean Elzy, Vopli Vidoplyasova, DakhaBrakha, Dakh Daughters, Ruslana and Ivan Dorn work the folk material in public, and the conductor Kirill Karabits works it in the concert hall.

Why borscht went on an emergency list

The kitchen rests on grain and root vegetables. Chicken supplies about half of Ukrainian meat consumption, followed by pork and beef; potatoes, cabbage, mushrooms and beetroot are eaten everywhere; pickled vegetables count as a delicacy; and salo, cured pork fat, is described as the national one. Bread is the visible end of the black-earth agriculture the country lives on. The everyday dishes are varenyky, nalysnyky, kapusnyak and holubtsi, the ceremonial baking is the korovai and the Easter paska, and the drinks are uzvar, ryazhanka and horilka.

Borscht sits at the centre of that, and in 2022 it became the subject of an international legal instrument. Ukraine had placed the culture of borscht cooking on its national heritage register in 2020 and expected to nominate it for UNESCO's Representative List in the 2023 cycle. After the full-scale invasion the government asked the Committee to fast-track the file to the Urgent Safeguarding list as a case of extreme urgency, and the Committee inscribed it on 1 July 2022. The stated reason was that displacement had made the practice itself impossible: people could not grow the local vegetables, could not cook the dish, and could not gather to eat it. UNESCO recorded at the same time that inscription implies neither exclusivity nor ownership, since borscht is cooked across the wider region. It joined four elements from Ukraine already on the UNESCO lists.

What the invasion did to cultural sites

Two bodies are counting the damage under different definitions. Ukraine's Ministry of Culture and Information Policy counts 1,945 damaged items of cultural infrastructure since the full-scale invasion of 2022, a category taking in cultural clubs, libraries, museums, galleries, theatres, zoos and art schools, and has estimated that rebuilding them may take about ten years. UNESCO verified damage to 247 sites between February 2022 and March 2023, of which 107 were religious sites, 89 were buildings of artistic or historical interest, 19 were monuments and 12 were libraries.

The World Heritage listings moved with the fighting. Ukraine ratified the World Heritage Convention on 12 October 1988 and has eight inscribed properties, seven cultural and one natural. The historic centre of Odesa was inscribed on 25 January 2023, in the face of threats of destruction, and on 15 September 2023 the Kyiv properties, Saint-Sophia Cathedral with its monastic buildings and the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, together with the historic centre of Lviv, went onto the List of World Heritage in Danger. Libraries have been struck directly, among them the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine and the Maksymovych Scientific Library of Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University.

In occupied territory the mechanism is the nineteenth-century one. Human Rights Watch, in a report titled "Ukraine: Forced Russified Education Under Occupation", documents schools teaching only in Russian in settlements that were entirely Ukrainian-speaking, Ukrainian textbooks banned, and Ukrainian-language study conducted in secret from the occupation authorities. Film has run the other way: the documentary 20 Days in Mariupol won the Academy Award for best documentary feature on 10 March 2024, the first Oscar in the country's history.

How religion is divided in Ukraine

Religious practice is high and unevenly spread. A 2021 survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found 82% of Ukrainians describing themselves as religious, 7% as atheists and 11% unable to answer, with the figure reaching 91% in western Ukraine and falling to 57% in the Donbas and 56% in eastern Ukraine.

In 2019, 82% of the population was Christian: 72.7% Eastern Orthodox, 8.8% Ukrainian Greek Catholic, 2.3% Protestant and 0.9% Latin Church Catholic, with Judaism, Islam and Hinduism at 0.2% each. The Orthodox population is itself divided between the Orthodox Church of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. Greek Catholics practise Byzantine rites while in communion with Rome, which makes them Catholic and eastern at once.

The calendar follows from the churches. Many Ukrainian holidays are set by the old Julian calendar and fall on different days from their Gregorian counterparts, Christmas and New Year's Eve among them. The gatherings that mark the year include Malanka, Koliaduvannia, Masliana and Ivan Kupala Night, and vechornytsi, the winter evening gathering, has a long documented history as a form of its own.

What Ukrainian sport is built on

The physical plant came from the Soviet Union, which built hundreds of stadiums, swimming pools and gymnasiums in Ukraine as a matter of policy and left them behind. Football carries most of the attention. Dynamo Kyiv and Shakhtar Donetsk are the clubs with the trophies: Dynamo has taken the UEFA Cup Winners' Cup twice and the UEFA Super Cup once, along with thirteen USSR championships and twelve Ukrainian ones, while Shakhtar holds four Ukrainian championships and one UEFA Cup. The national team debuted at the 2006 World Cup and reached the quarter-finals, going out to Italy, who won the tournament.

Boxing is where the individual titles sit. Oleksandr Usyk became undisputed cruiserweight champion in 2018 and went on to hold the unified WBA (Super), IBF, WBO and IBO heavyweight titles. Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko held multiple heavyweight world titles across their careers. Vasyl Lomachenko took Olympic gold in 2008 and again in 2012, and ties the record for winning a professional world title in the fewest fights, at three.

Elsewhere the record is individual. Serhiy Bubka held the pole vault world record from 1993 to 2014. Chess is widely played, with about 85 grandmasters in the country, and Ruslan Ponomariov is a former world champion. The national basketball team finished sixth at EuroBasket 2013 and qualified for the FIBA World Cup for the first time. Ukraine made its Winter Olympic debut in 1994.