Folklore & Esoterica
Koliada and the winter singing
The carols sung in Ukraine at Christmas divide into two kinds, and the older kind has nothing to do with Christmas at all.
Folklore & Esoterica
The ritual year, the symbols embroidered into cloth and painted onto eggs, the Carpathian practitioners and the philosophers — the older layer beneath modern Ukraine.
Folklore & Esoterica
The Ukrainian ritual year, mapped
The Ukrainian calendar of observance is not a list of holidays. It is an agricultural year with a Christian layer laid over an older one, and…
Folklore & Esoterica
Ukrainian cuisine and the produce economy behind it
A kitchen built on fermentation, sour dairy, freshwater fish and buckwheat, in a country that grows most of what it eats. The food is regional in…
Folklore & Esoterica
Trinity Sunday and the green rites of early summer
Fifty days after Easter, houses fill with cut birch and floor herbs, and the smell is the point. Underneath the church feast is a rite about…
Folklore & Esoterica
Easter in Ukraine: the basket, the bread and the layer underneath
The most widely observed religious occasion in the country, including among people who attend church at no other point in the year. What is in the…
Folklore & Esoterica
Religion in Ukraine: jurisdictions, numbers and why church questions carry political weight
Two Orthodox jurisdictions, a large Greek Catholic west, Protestant communities with unusual reach, and a Muslim population with a specific history. The map is complicated and…
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