Think of grand Orthodox churches with towering spires, or modest wooden structures with their characteristic architecture. Listen to the Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus, singing and playing their handmade banduras without a director. View the colorful Cossack costumes of the men, the intricately embroidered garb of the women as they dance. Marvel at the famed Easter eggs and savor the secrets of Ukrainian cookery. These are the overt expressions of the rich culture that Ukrainians have brought to America--the top layer, so to speak.
A more subtle expression is the intellectual life of the scholars, the preservation of the Ukrainian language, the writers and poets, sculptors, fraternal organizations, women's societies, serious patriotism to America, and an equally dedicated resolve to see Ukraine a free and independent republic again. Today, there are about 1,500,000 Ukrainian-Americans, counted through church membership, census figures, and immigration records, but because of Ukraine's complex history, it is impossible to know their number for certain.
Ukrainians are ethnic descendants of the Slavs, which today include the Poles, the Slovaks, the Czechs, the Serbians, the Croatians, the Slovenes, and the Bulgarians. Russians are the largest nationality; Ukrainians are second, with a population of 49 million. Ukraine's capital, Kiev, was founded in the eighth century. It is the country's largest city, with a population of two million, and the third largest city in the Soviet Union. Located in the southeastern corner of Europe, Ukraine is bounded by the Black Sea in the south, the Pripet, Desna, and Seym rivers in the north, the Caucasus Mountains and the Don River in the east, and the southern Dniester River and Carpathian Mountains in the west. Known today as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, it is bordered by Rumania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Byelorussia, and Russia.
The territorial area of present-day Ukraine encompasses 232,000 square miles. This huge area makes Ukraine geographically the second largest in Europe--far larger than France, with as many square miles as British Columbia.
It is a land richly endowed by nature with excellent fertile soil, valued for agriculture. Famous as the "breadbasket of Europe," Ukraine is one of the world's top producers of rye, wheat, barley, sugar beets, potatoes, corn, and oats. There are natural resources too: coal, oil, salt, manganese ore, and iron ore--all valuable for the Soviet Union's industrialization. It's little wonder that jealous neighbors have alternately taken over Ukraine by force through the centuries.
Ukrainians use the Cyrillic alphabet, a Slavic adaptation of the Greek alphabet. Their language, which is spoken by more than 40 million people, is classified as a separate unit of the Slavic group of Indo-European languages. It is a distinct language rather than a dialect, and shows substantial difference from Russian in both grammar and vocabulary.
The earliest literary works in Ukraine, dating from the tenth and eleventh centuries, were historical chronicles, liturgical writings, and religious sermons. Until the sixteenth century, the written language of Ukraine was church Slavonic, but during the next two centuries, there was a gradual shift to the vernacular, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the native spoken language had become
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