Black earth and beech forest
About 44 percent of Ukraine lies on chernozem, the black earth of the steppe, and in its deepest form this humus-rich soil runs down 1.5 to 2 metres. Ukraine is the second-largest country in Europe after Russia, and most of it is this fertile open plain, crossed by rivers such as the Dnipro on their way south to the Black Sea. The soil earned the country the title "bread basket of Europe". In 2020/21 it was the sixth-largest exporter of wheat and supplied about half of the world's sunflower oil exports.
The land finally rises in the far west, where the Carpathians climb to Hoverla, the highest peak at 2,061 metres. Old beech woods on these slopes joined UNESCO's World Heritage List in 2007 in a site shared with Slovakia. The mountains are also home to the Hutsuls, who traditionally lived by forestry and livestock and are known for woodwork, rug weaving and decorated eggs.
Cave monks and coffee houses
Kyiv straddles the Dnipro, its older western side spread over wooded hills. It was the anchor of Kievan Rus, which emerged in the ninth century and which Belarus, Russia and Ukraine all claim as a cultural ancestor. Prince Vladimir ordered the city's people baptised in 988. Under Yaroslav the Wise came the cathedral of Saint Sophia, originally crowned with 13 domes. In 1051, according to one chronicle date, a monk named Anthony settled in a cave overlooking the river, and the monastery that grew there, the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, takes its name from pechera, the word for cave. Cathedral and monastery joined the World Heritage List together in 1990.
Lviv tells a different story. Daniel of Galicia founded it in the mid-thirteenth century and named it after his son Lev, who set aside districts for Armenian, Tatar and Jewish newcomers. It has also been Lwów, Lemberg and Leopolis. Austrian rule brought coffee houses and an opera house in Viennese neo-Renaissance style, and UNESCO listed the historic centre in 1998.
Free men and wandering singers
The word Cossack comes from a Turkic term for a free man, and it came to mean people who found no place in settled society and left for open country. From about 1552 they kept a fortified base, the Sich, on the Dnipro. In 1648 Bohdan Khmelnytsky led the largest Cossack rising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and built a state under an elected hetman. Catherine II abolished that office in 1764, and a Russian army destroyed the last Sich in 1775. The songs outlasted the fortress: UNESCO listed the Cossack songs of the Dnipropetrovsk region in 2016, and they still tell of soldiers and the people they loved.
Old stories also travelled with the kobzars, wandering bards, usually blind, who sang to the bandura, a lute-like instrument with 32 to 55 strings. Their name became the title of Kobzar, the 1840 collection by Taras Shevchenko, who was born a serf in 1814 and freed in 1838 with the proceeds of a lottery. Regarded as the national bard, he legitimised Ukrainian as a language of modern literature, though a Russian imperial decree of 1876 tightly restricted printing in it.
A Ukrainian republic was proclaimed in November 1917, and in 1922 the country became a Soviet republic. The Holodomor, the famine of 1932 and 1933, killed millions of people in Soviet Ukraine. The Second World War killed millions of civilians, most of Ukraine's Jews among them. Parliament declared independence on 24 August 1991, and about 92 percent of voters approved it that December. Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014 after a disputed referendum. On 24 February 2022 Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Thread, wax and beetroot
Archaeology suggests embroidery has a prehistoric past here, and it lives on in the vyshyvanka, the embroidered shirt, named from the verb "to embroider". Men and women alike wear it, with the main design on the upper sleeve. Patterns change as you travel: geometric in Polisia and the Hutsul country, floral in the centre and east, often in just one or two colours such as black and red. Embroidered towels, rushnyky, have a place at weddings and around holy icons. Vyshyvanka Day, begun at Chernivtsi National University in 2006, brings the shirts out on the third Thursday of May.
The pysanka, the decorated Easter egg, takes its name from pysaty, to write, because its designs are written in beeswax with a small tool called a kistka. The egg is dyed in stages, and at the end the wax is melted away to reveal the pattern. Each region, each village and almost every family once had its own ritual.
Then there is borscht, broth combined with beetroot, sugar beet or fermented beet juice, cooked in a big pot and served with bread or garlic buns. UNESCO added its culture to the urgent safeguarding list in 2022. There are many versions, and children help make it alongside the adults. In Podillia a wedding custom even carries its name. Above all it is a dish of hospitality, and in a country shaped by its soil, it seems right that the welcome comes from a root.
