Kyiv has once again celebrated Ivan Kupalo Day. The eve of St. John the Baptist is one of the most popular of Ukraine’s pre-Christian feasts. A dramatized folklore extravaganza was staged in Kyiv’s Obolon Park as part of the all- Ukrainian Chervona Ruta (Red Rue) festival.
The group Dai Bozhe (God Willing), which organized the festivities, entertained visitors with Ukrainian folk songs and dances, mostly from central Ukraine. According to emcee Taras Melnyk, the group organized the festival in two months, although the members spent a whole year looking for material.
“The initiative to stage this event belongs to our group Dai Bozhe,” Melnyk said. “We repeatedly asked the municipal authorities to help us organize it, but at first they rejected our program. We even had to search for funding sources by ourselves. All this stems from ignorance of Ukrainian traditions and the importance of this feast for our people.”
This is not the first Ivan Kupalo Day that Dai Bozhe has organized. The group has also performed in Nyvky and Rusanivka. In addition to the traditional dances and games that are held around the festive bonfire, this year’s program included new rites, such as collecting used items and fighting the mythical heroine Kupailytsia. In this game boys and girls fight to get their hands on a branch of a sour cherry tree. The girls try to hang onto it, but the boys always manage to wrestle it from them. This rite symbolizes girls’ demureness, a quality that was once highly esteemed and considered mandatory for every Ukrainian female.
According to ancient Ukrainian traditions, the revelers burned an effigy of Mara, rolled a fiery wheel, sent flower wreaths floating down the Dnipro River, and cooked millet meal in a cauldron. The residents of Kyiv and their guests, especially young people, were not afraid to jump arm in arm over the bonfire, which is one of the crucial events of the festival. This year one festival- goer bungled his jump and almost got burned. Luckily, only his clothing was singed. By all accounts, on July 6 many Kyiv girls came home wearing a gorgeous green wreath woven from a variety of herbs, flowers, and small twigs. There were crowds of females — little girls, teenagers, and adult women — in Obolon Park wearing this type of magnificent headgear. Some festival-goers wore Ukrainian national costumes, including Cossack attire. The main goal of the Ivan Kupalo festivities is to honor our national clothing and remember our traditions.
COMMENTARY
Vadym SKURATIVSKY , art historian, philologist, historian, and corresponding member of Ukraine’s Academy of Arts
“This is an astronomical festival, and it has a cosmic aspect to it. So we may conclude that it used to be very important to people. This feast occupies a very significant place in Ukrainian culture and history. We should not forget that if the “red” Latvians had not gone to celebrate Ivan Kupalo in 1917, leaving Moscow and the Kremlin unguarded and thus providing access to the ultra- revolutionaries, the course of Ukrainian history would have been entirely different. If we had had a normal history in the 19th and 20th centuries, this festival could now be attracting people from every part of the world, like the huge crowds that flock to the carnival in Rio de Janeiro.”
