Features
Listen closely and the Ukrainian wind may still carry an ancient song sung by blind minstrels, a song that tells a spellbinding tale of Cossack courage and their heroic quest for Ukraine’s freedom. Traveling from village to village as ox-drawn carts stumbled across muddy roads leading into dark forests, Ukraine’s minstrels once trudged past Baroque churches with Greek domes and mosaic Virgins pieced together from crimson, turquoise and emerald fragments and wandered freely across the Ukrainian steppe. Indeed, Ukraine’s blind minstrels, called kobzari, are special in the country’s history, in part, because of their traditional customs as well as their tragic ending.
Features
Of course, the writers at Ukraine.com hope that our website will be your first stop on the Internet superhighway to learn about this emerging travel destination, but to compliment your viewing, why not try the newly created Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine?
Features
Trudging along a Kyiv street, a man in a long dark coat with books and newspapers swinging from the buttons, whispers madly to no one in particular. Crowds of people along the pavement separate like water around dangerous rocks allowing the lonely man to pass.
Features
What remains is history or rather, a memory of history for many older Ukrainians. Four walls, not or a country, are often a Ukrainian family’s only sanctuary, their faith in permanence, razor thin. An agrarian country, Ukrainians’ undisputed connection to the land surpassed Tsars and Communist leaders alike. The dacha, originally a shed next to an accompanying plot of land, embodies a necessary “retreat” from the urban Ukrainian landscape.
Features
Two years after the peaceful protests that shone a spotlight on the falsified presidential elections and eventually ushered in the pro-democratic, pro-Western government of Viktor Yushchenko, Ukrainians are in a political funk. Disappointment and disillusionment with both the revolution’s opponents and the current leadership has soured the once buoyant mood.
Features
Amidst the region of the world once behind an Iron Curtain, a race to join Europe’s elite union is heating up, and while Poland may have been one of the first countries to be embraced by the European Union, quickly followed by Bulgaria and Romania, but one country, Ukraine, is turning the heads of European Union leaders since the heady days of the Orange Revolution in 2004.
Features
Two world wars drove many to America as did years of Soviet domination, yet, as the history unfolds Ukrainian-Americans remained fiercely committed to their Motherland. These days, Ukrainians on the streets of Chicago and Philadelphia, New York and Detroit are enjoying the early flush of their Motherland’s independence from afar, and raising money for the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy (NUKMA) to educate the next generation of Ukraine’s leaders.
Features
Towering ducks, coffee pots, Paul Bunyan, mini-Stonehenge monuments made of refrigerator doors, bovines and 12-story apples may dot the roadside’s of America, and while the town of Vegreville in Alberta, Canada boasts a 26 foot long and 18 foot wide pyanka Easter egg that spins like a weather vane and was constructed in the 1970s to honor the centennial year of the Mounties, the Ukrainian town of Kolomiya wins the prize for the prize for turning a roadside structure into a museum.
