For the past couple of years, we’ve been taking an annual look at how the end-of-year holidays are celebrated in various parts of our broadcast region. Ukraine has a diverse array of traditions associated with Christmas and winter festivities, and this year, millions of Ukrainians will be observing these seasonal customs far away from their homeland and their loved ones. We talked to two Ukrainian families in the Czech Republic who have fled the war in their country about their memories of Christmas and of the friends and family they’ve left behind.
USTI NAD LABEM, Czech Republic -- Like many of his compatriots, Nazar Ismailov will be celebrating Christmas away from home for the first time this year.
Originally from Kharkiv, the 11-year-old fled with his mother, Olha, to the Czech Republic not long after Russia launched its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in late February.
“We lived for one day in the metro, we spent one night there, and then we found a bunker and we lived there for 10 days,” he says. “And then we took an evacuation train and ended up in the Czech Republic.”
“We were under great stress,” says Olha, a single mom who ran her own apartment-refurbishment business in Ukraine before the conflict. She explains that they only came here because a friend who lives in the Czech Republic invited them when the invasion started.
She and Nazar have since moved to the industrial town of Usti nad Labem in northwest Bohemia, where she has found a job on an auto-assembly line.
Having been here for around nine months, Nazar has settled in well and is already quite confident in using the Czech he has learned, although he still lapses back into his native Russian when he becomes animated, which often happens as he recalls life in his hometown.
When asked what he misses most about the place, one of the first things he thinks of is Kulynychi pastry shops, which were dotted all over Kharkiv before the war and whose cakes he loved.
Although he now has a Czech kitten, whom he plays with constantly during the interview, he also misses Andy and Ryzhyk, his two cats back home, not to mention his best friend and grandparents. They are still living in the embattled city, and he hopes he’ll be able to talk to them on Christmas Day, circumstances permitting.
“I’m in contact with granny; she writes to us and mom writes to her,” he says. “My friend writes to me every day. I talk to granny every evening, if they have electricity and an Internet signal.”
Although her family in Kharkiv are managing for now, the ongoing conflict has Olha constantly worried about them.
“It’s a little bit calmer in Kharkiv compared to how it was at the very beginning, but not a day goes by without some sort of missile landing in the city,” she says, speaking through an interpreter.
Because of the constant bombardment, she says her parents spend a lot of time in their small summer house near Kharkiv.
“They live mostly there on the outskirts of the city,” she says. “Because they have a furnace there with wood for heating, and they also have some ducks, chickens, and rabbits, which provide them with eggs and meat, so they have something to eat.”
Olha says she will be observing the usual seasonal traditions this year, but -- with her parents still in Ukraine -- one important ritual won’t be possible.
“For Christmas dinner, the whole family congregates at the place of the oldest member -- so if the grandmother and grandfather are alive, everyone meets at the grandparents,” she says.
Although her parents are in Kharkiv, Olha says she’ll do her best to celebrate Christmas in the usual manner here in the Czech Republic.
Although many Ukrainians in recent years have been encouraged to celebrate Christmas on December 25 in a symbolic alignment with the West, Olha -- who has a set of icons that she brought from Kharkiv on her living room wall -- says she’ll be celebrating the festival on the standard Eastern date of January 7 and will go to mass on Christmas Eve at a local Orthodox Church she found in the area.
And then, she says, “We will have our traditional dinner in the evening with our friend, Viktoria, who is from Oleksandria in the Kirovohrad region, where the situation is also very bad.”
Kutya And Uzvar
For their svyata vecherya -- the traditional meal consisting of 12 meatless dishes on Christmas Eve, the night before the end of the seasonal fast -- they will make sure to have both uzvar -- a traditional compote drink made with fruit and berries -- and kutya, a milky grain mash sweetened with berries, raisins, and honey mixed with nuts and poppyseeds.
After a discussion with the interpreter about the difficulty of finding the right dried fruits in the Czech Republic for this year’s uzvar, Olha mentions that it is usually the responsibility of Nazar’s godfather to bring the fruity beverage to her home on Christmas Eve. He also usually brings the kutya, but that won’t happen this Christmas, as he is now in western Ukraine.
“Nazar’s godfather brought it every year. It was a family tradition,” she says, adding that they will still make sure to have the grain porridge this year, as it is the central dish of their evening feast.
“The first meal people eat is the kutya -- even if it’s just a spoonful, because it is very sweet…,” she says. “We start with the kutya and then eat the rest.”
Although growing up in a city means Nazar is only vaguely familiar with the many popular rural Christmas traditions in Ukraine, he does vividly remember some of his own family’s customs, such as finding something sweet under his pillow on the feast of St. Nicholas (December 19) and getting a present for New Year.
He and his mother also recall going to mass once the first star appeared in the sky on Christmas Eve and making sure to walk three times around the church before going home with a lit red candle.
A Hard Start
Now that she has been in the country for nine months, Olha says “it was hard at the start” to get used to things in the Czech Republic.
Although initially, she says, “we weren’t able to find any of the shops we needed, because everything was in a different language,” things have got a bit easier, especially as Nazar’s Czech is getting better.
“He helps me a lot and always comes with me to local authorities and translates for me,” she says, although Nazar points out that he’s struggling a bit with hard and soft Czech consonants, and sometimes gets confused by words like vůně, which means pleasantly fragrant in Czech, but sounds like a foul stench in Russian.
Although he tries to keep up with his Ukrainian schooling via online lessons, Nazar also attends a Czech school and says the subjects he was learning back home are not taught in the same way in the local curriculum.
“If he spends two years here studying in the Czech system, he will never catch up on what he missed in the Ukrainian school system when he goes back,” says Olha. “He will no longer be able to aim for a Ukrainian university. He wouldn’t have the knowledge that you would need there.”
Nazar, for his part, says that the longer he stays here, the more distant home could become.
“I think I’ll become a little bit Czech because I’ll have to communicate in this environment,” he says. “I will get used to the people here and these surroundings.”
He’s also not sure whether he wants to go home following the conflict that has ravaged his hometown.
“We don’t know what will happen after the war…because we don’t know what it will be like and what will be left,” he says. “If there is nothing there, naturally I won’t be keen about going back. Everything will be different.”
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PRAGUE – Months after Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, Olena Bezzubenko and members of her family have finally moved into a small apartment in the Czech capital.
Until now, she had been staying in a hotel with her two daughters and two grandsons.
Located in a gray Prague neighborhood, the communist-era facility had been earmarked for refurbishment before its Ukrainian operator made it available to refugees displaced by the conflict back home.
For the past nine months, they and scores of other women and children have been sharing this basic accommodation. Flung together by the chaos of war, Olena says a strong bond has developed among those living in the hotel.
“All the Ukrainians staying here have become like one family,” she says. “We are united by a common grief. But there are many children who feel what their mothers feel. We tried to stay focused by helping our children.”
As a way of keeping the children occupied at a time of great turbulence in their lives, the women at the hotel organized activities for the youngsters.
She put her own experience as a costume designer at a theater back home in Kyiv to good use by teaching them bead weaving. The kids also have dancing classes, she says, and they attend a club that organizes events that help them integrate with the local Czech community.
“The kids made many drawings, and we’ve decided to have an exhibition in January,” she says, adding that such activities help keep everyone’s mind off the horrific conflict raging back home.
“Every Ukrainian woman staying at this hotel has family in Ukraine: a husband, a brother, or a child who all fight for us,” says Olena, whose own son-in-law is still in Kyiv. “It helps us to be busy.”
She’s also keeping busy by helping to organize events for Christmas, which they’ll celebrate as usual on January 7.
“We’ve decided to sing traditional Ukrainian songs [and] the kids will be singing and dancing,” she says, adding that she and her daughters are also planning a traditional 12-course meatless meal, including kutya, on Christmas Eve.
“Christmas is a family time,” she says. “We’ll put up a candle and we’ll be praying for our family to stay together…. My son-in-law will join us by Skype if there’s no power outage in Kyiv. But we exchange audio messages every day.”
Despite being determined to observe Christmas traditions this year, Olena says she actually doesn’t have terribly happy memories of childhood Christmases in communist Ukraine.
“We’d go to a morning party with a New Year tree, dressed in costumes. But it wasn’t that much fun,” she says. “The very word Christmas was banned. It was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union that Christmas reappeared.”
Unlike her mother, Olena’s daughter, Vira, has grown up observing many Ukrainian customs at this time of year. Although she's now found work cooking and teaching at a kindergarten in Prague, she had been a cultural studies student in Kyiv before the war, so has long had a fondness for local traditions.
This has also been fostered by her interest in folk dancing, which she describes as “an integral part of Ukrainian culture,” including Christmas celebrations.
Malanka, Didukhs, And Christmas Spiders
In recent years, before the war, her family had purchased a country house in the Vinnytsya region and became interested in reviving rural Christmastime traditions, including Malanka -- an ancient pagan-rooted festival that Vira and Olena say “is celebrated differently in every village” but usually involves “lots of funny activities,” including a large procession of people dressed in masks and animal costumes who communally consume “ritual food…followed by dancing and songs.”
At this time of year, Vira also observes “a bunch of other folk Christmas traditions, like making didukhs and weaving ‘spiders’ with straw.”
She remembers Christmases in the country when “the villagers gathered to weave spiders together.”
“According to tradition, a spider in the corner, above the dining table or cradle, makes demons go away,” she says.
Didukhs, on the other hand, are a seasonal decoration that Vira says are “set up instead of a Christmas tree.”
“It is made of wheat because bread has the greatest value,” she adds. “The didukh symbolizes the ancestors and honors the family.”
Olena remembers how she used to make many seasonal costumes for children at this time of year.
“Once I made costumes for 30 kids ahead of Christmas,” she says. “After that, I couldn’t stand the look of a sewing machine for a month.”
Making these outfits meant she had many leftovers, and she used these to make rag dolls that are traditional in Ukraine at this time of year.
“These dolls are made in winter where there’s more free time in the village,” says Vira, who says they can be used as a protective charm, as well as a form of nuptial divination.
“This doll...has a few collars, each one symbolizing the qualities of a would-be husband,” Olena explains. “The doll is placed near the window, so potential grooms know there’s a bride available in the house.”
Olena's been making Ukrainian rag dolls again this wintertime and has started selling them to earn a little extra money on top of the income she gets doing freelance tailoring work.
“I’ve made 10 so far,” she says. “A friend of ours asked us to make one for her friend, and he burst into tears when he saw the doll made for him. It was very emotional.”
'Less Time For Worrying'
Although her thoughts are rarely far from home, Olena says she and her family will stay in the Czech Republic for the time being because she’s concerned about the well-being of one of her grandsons, whose studies had been suffering back in Ukraine.
“He likes it here,” she says. “He’s even started to perform better at school.”
While she remains in the Czech Republic, Olena also plans to promote Ukrainian culture here and hold master classes on traditional crafts.
“Lots of Czech women and kids want to take part in our activities, like sewing and knitting,” she says. “Crafts make us closer. They tell a lot about the people and help us to better understand each other.
“Our Czech friends are learning Ukrainian, and they are good at it,” she adds. “We are very pleased that they have an interest in our culture. It encourages us to study our culture deeper. It keeps me busy and leaves less time for worrying.”
With contributions from RFE/RL’s Petr Serebrianyi, filmmaker Vlad Lanne, and Yana Markova from the Czech NGO People In Need, which is arranging aid for Ukrainian refugees.
