It was launched formally last night [Aug. 16], for the 45th time since inception in 1966, at the village of Velyki Sorochyntsi, Myrhorod raion, Poltava oblast.
This fair has gained momentum and won increasing popularity with producers in all of Ukraine’s rural areas and far beyond its borders. Every year the Sorochyntsi Fair is attended by a million persons, among them a number of businessmen and craftsmen who bring their merchandise. Last year, there were about 600 such craftsmen. This year a matching, if not exceeding, number are expected from Ukraine, Russia, Moldova, Georgia, Belarus, Germany, and Poland.
Traditionally, the annual Sorochyntsi Fair offers a variety of goods, ranging from sausages, chickens to forks, pans, reels of thread, shirts and blouses. However, the most popular on displays are the vyshyvanka hand-embroidered Ukrainian shirts and blouses, home-made, hand-ornamented pottery, halushky meat, sauerkraut, mashed potato stuffed dumplings, salo fatback, and medovukha, an Old Slavic alcoholic beverage very similar to mead.
Not surprisingly, every Sorochyntsi fair is an apt opportunity to remind one and all of Ukraine’s old but still good crafts, except that all such ideas remain on paper. This year, on the first day of the Sorochyntsi Fair, Natalia Korolivska, chairperson of the Verkhovna Rada’s committee on entrepreneurship and regulatory policy, organized a roundtable with craftsmen. They discussed the problems of traditional Ukrainian crafts, businesses, and taxes.
Natalia boasted a hand-embroidered vyshyvanka at the roundtable. She later admitted she had bought it at a gift shop in Kyiv, and it was actually a Chinese product, adding, “I’m outraged by such needlework made in China and then sold to naїve tourists as a genuine Ukrainian product. Ditto allegedly Ukrainian wickerwork made in Malaysia, ‘Ukrainian’ souvenirs painted in Turkey, with woo souvenirs boasting the le-gend Slava Ukraini — Glory to Ukraine — carved in China.”
Market demand for Ukrainian souvenirs has long surpassed the local supply, so naturally, foreign businessmen were quick on the uptake. Hence, the vyshyvankas with made-in-China labels. Experts say this is only natural, considering that the Ukrainian government has not given a hoot about this industry for 18 years.
Svitlana Svyshcheva, today’s coordinator of the Sorochyntsi project, told The Day that, after the businesses, originally part of Ukrkhudozhprom, had been privatized, this folk craft project went on a swift downward curve, with folk workshops closing in Bohuslav, Lubny, and Reshytylivka. The lack or destruction of the material-technical base at 117 schools with folk craft classes had a devastating effect. “We have lost the main thing, the continuity of the folk creative tradition. Old craftsmen are no longer able to share their experience with gifted youth,” said Svyshcheva.
