Vyshyvanka Day, 15 May 2025
A greeting for a day that is now worn in a great many countries at once, by people who did not plan to be there.
A good Vyshyvanka Day to everyone wearing one today, wherever they are.
That last part has become the point. This day is now kept in Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Toronto and a hundred smaller places, by families who did not choose to be there and by children who are growing up bilingual whether anyone intended it or not.
A shirt is a practical thing to carry into displacement. It folds flat, it needs no explanation, and putting it on in a foreign school on a particular Thursday in May tells the other children something that would take a long time to say.
To everyone at home in Ukraine today, and to everyone marking it somewhere they did not expect to be: the pattern is the same either way.
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