Under this motto an all-Ukraine fatback lovers’ festival of humor was held in Romny, Sumy oblast, organized by the city executive committee. Many guests went to the oblast center to attest to their affection for the Ukrainian nation product, fatback. Among them were Nadiya Komarnytska McConnell, President of the Ukraine-US Foundation; Vira Andrushkiv, director of the Communal Partnership to Disseminate Local Self-government Experience Program (Washington), and Ukraine’s leading stand-up performers, writers, and poets.
Among those interested in the festival were people from the State Academic Pig-breeding Institute of Ukraine. And with reason, because the festival eclipsed in the opening of Ukraine’s first and the world’s fourth (after Portugal, Germany, and Denmark) statue portraying a pig sitting on its hind legs and a legend reading, “From one hundred percent Ukrainians in the year 2000.” According to Larysa Birkun, head of Romny’s city executive committee’s cultural department, the idea to immortalize the pig belongs to Romny Mayor Viktor Strelchenko. He conceived it after being familiarized with archaeological finds by a team of experts from Kyiv. They spotted a site dating from the Golden Horde and unearthed pig bones, concluding that pigs, since Asian nomads never ate them and would not take them away from the people, must have saved the people from starving to death. What better motivation for immortalizing the animal’s image!
Despite the festival’s being timed to coincide with April Fool’s Day, here called Day of Humor, the organizing committee had quite serious things in mind, such as advertising pig-breeding and using the image as a trademark allocated a certain local business. Also, the local authorities regarded the festival as a kind of test of strength in trying to revive the once famous Ilyinska Yarmarka Fair where pigs were the most favored status commodity.
