This article was published in Gramarye,
the journal of the Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales,
Fantasy and Speculative Fiction, Summer 2024.
Vladyslava Bondar on the cover of
Gramarye, Issue 25. photo: Olha Holichenko
‘From my childhood I remember the three most important
events of the year,’ says Lesia Kyrylenko, who grew up
in central Ukraine: ‘Christmas in the winter, Easter in
spring, and Ivana Kupala in the summer.’ Now held in a
Brighton park, the midsummer Kupala festival has become
one of the most important events in the calendar of the
new Ukrainian community that formed in Sussex after the
full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Warmly embraced
and creatively reworked, Kupala’s traditions are a
powerful resource for sustaining the community and
enabling it to tell its stories.
Kupala is part of a midsummer festival tradition that
manifests in similar forms all across Europe, and over a
period of time that pre-dates the full ascendancy of
Christianity. People light bonfires on the longest day at
gatherings from Portugal and Ireland to Estonia and
Greece. In the fourth century CE, according to the martyr
St Vincent, pagans in southwestern France would set light
to a wheel and roll it down a hill to a river. In 21st-
century Ukraine, Lesia Kyrylenko and her neighbours would
set car tyres on fire and send them tumbling down a hill,
‘like a symbol of the sun’.
Bonfires and burning wheels are not a feature of Kupala
in Brighton, where the celebrations have to comply with
park rules and municipal safety regulations. Nor is there
any open water, apart from a small ornamental pond. But
even though the two fundamental symbolic elements of fire
and water are unavailable, the site has become part of the
festival’s character. There are hints of the home
landscape. Preston Park is on a hillside, crowned by a
fringe of woodland that serves to evoke Kupala’s natural
habitat in the Ukrainian countryside – and at the base of
the valley, underneath the London road, there is a ‘lost’
subterranean river. But the site’s greatest emotional
significance is that the first Kupala celebration there,
in July 2022, was also the first major occasion at which
Ukrainians who had reached Sussex in the preceding months
came together as a new community.
Kupala in Preston Park, Brighton, July 2023. photo: Manal Gharzeddin
The Kupala the Ukrainians created was a mixture of
traditions recalled from the different parts of the
country they came from, adapted both to the new setting
and the traumatic situation in which they now found
themselves. Much of the lore and the rituals would have
looked familiar to the peasants described by the author of
the 17th-century Gustyn Chronicle, probably based near
Chernihiv in northern Ukraine, who identified the figure
of Kupalo as a pagan god – and thus, in Christian eyes, a
demon:
The commemoration of this demon Kupalo is still being celebrated in some of our lands by the foolish … in the evening, the plain folk of both sexes come together, and they wind wreaths from edible herbs or roots. When they have wound the herbs around themselves, they light a fire. In another place, they erect a green branch and, holding hands, they circle around this fire, singing their songs in which Kupalo is mentioned. Then they jump over the aforesaid fire, dedicating themselves to this demon.
Several hundred years later, Lesia Kyrylenko describes
picking flowers on the morning of the festival, making
them into wreaths, decorating a willow branch, dancing in
a circle and singing Kupala songs.
The Christian frustration evident in the chronicler’s
account of the ritual illustrates one of the features of
Kupala that has made it so appealing to Ukrainian
communities at very different moments in history. It was
given a Christian name, Ivana Kupala – Ivan, or John, is
St John the Baptist, whose feast-day falls around the time
of the summer solstice – but the festival is Christian in
name only. Nor was it ever a proper Soviet festival,
although the authorities in the USSR did try to reinvent
it as a celebration of agriculture. Natalie Kononenko, a
scholar of Ukrainian folklore, argued in
the early 2000s that its absence from church control
and Soviet calendars made it a ‘space outside all systems
where alternative identities are explored’. After Ukraine
became independent in 1991, Kupala ‘became and has
remained popular because it was one of the rituals through
which Ukrainians … began carving out a non-Soviet space
and establishing a non-Soviet identity’. For the new
Ukrainian community in Sussex, one of Kupala’s roles is to
sustain Ukrainian identity in a space safe from the
Russian aggressor that denies Ukraine has an identity of
its own.
Yuliia Poliakova serves Ukrainian food
at Kupala in 2023. photo: Best Foot Music
That particular tradition is completely absent from Kupala in Brighton: not only is there no river, but the theme of courtship risks being painful when men are far away, many of them fighting at the front. Nor, perhaps, does the quest for husbands fit especially well with the aspirations of the young women who devise and enact the Kupala rituals in Brighton. Instead, the symbols are used to bring together the community as a whole. Everybody joins in making the flower-crowns, known as vinochky, which are no longer restricted to young unmarried women. While some married women uphold tradition by not wearing them, others do – and so do one or two men.
This represents a subtle but significant difference between Kupala in Brighton and a trend that emerged in post-independence Ukrainian Ivana Kupala celebrations, in which modernisation diluted the folklore and turned the festivals into more generic summer party gatherings. Brighton’s Kupala is modern, combining old folk songs with contemporary ones performed to pre-recorded backing tracks, but the modern songs draw on traditional forms, and support the traditions instead of supplanting them. Relaxing the rules about who should wear vinochky makes the wreaths a more familiar element of Kupala, shared by a larger number of its participants, and thus helps to maintain them as a symbol. In Brighton, modernisation works to reinvent and reinvigorate Kupala, shaping it to serve the needs of the present moment.
The Kupala 2023 drama (right:
director / performer Anastasiia Bohdanova). photo:
Manal Gharzeddin
At the 2023 Kupala, the key to that reshaping was
the most intensely magical element of Kupala, the fern flower.
This imaginary bloom is said to appear during the night of
Kupala, and if anyone is fortunate enough to find it, they
can make a wish that will come true. It became the pivotal
device in a drama piece created by Anastasiia Bohdanova,
the community’s theatre director. The play wove Kupala
themes into a narrative setting the festival into its
contemporary context, and addressing the question that
hangs over it today: what is the place of a celebration in
wartime?
The story began with three young women singing songs
about love and finding a partner. They go to vechornytsi,
courtship gatherings held in autumn and winter. In the
past, these were usually hosted by an older woman in her
home; nowadays the modern versions are held in venues such
as community centres. It’s at such a gathering that a
young man, Ivanko, confesses his feelings for one of the
women, Marichka. He proposes marriage, but then a war
starts – which one is not specified, because it alludes to
Ukraine’s long history of wars, but his camouflage jacket
points to the present conflict. Kupala comes around; he is
at the front, and she protests to the people around her
that they can’t sing and dance while a war is going on.
They reply that the rituals are for keeping their
traditions alive, not for having a party. Supported by her
community, Marichka joins in with the preparations for
Kupala, despite her feelings. Then she meets a widow who
tells her she understands what she is going through, and
points out that her fiancé may not yet be lost. Marichka
sets out to find the fern flower, so that she can make a
wish for his return. She finds it, makes the wish, and
turns round to see Ivanko there, alive, together with
other soldiers back safe from the frontline.
The couple wed, and the community celebrates, in a reworked version of the Kupala bonfire tradition. According to Kupala lore, if partners manage to keep holding hands as they jump the bonfire, they will stay together. In the Brighton celebration, the bonfire was symbolised by bands of red cloth, shaken to represent flames. The bride and groom held one of the bands between them, a little like a guard of honour, and the crowd jumped through in mixed-up pairs – adults, children, friends – rather than couples. It promised that the Ukrainian community would stay together, across generations: much of the impetus that helped bring Kupala to Brighton came from parents who wanted their children to know and practice Ukrainian culture, even though some of them had previously had little interest in the traditions themselves. Some had little experience of them either, having grown up in places where Ukrainian customs were not observed; they now welcomed the opportunity to learn the songs and dances for themselves.
It was also an act that helped to create a wider community. When Ukrainians jumped the ‘bonfire’ with their new local friends, from Britain and other countries, it had the same symbolic meaning as when couples jumped real bonfires in Ukraine: that the relationship between them would be strong and enduring. One of the main reasons for holding a Kupala celebration in Brighton was that it offered a way to thank local people for their support, by sharing Ukrainian culture with them.
Kira Makogon, Chair of Stand for
Ukraine Brighton & Hove. photo: Anastasiia
Bohdanova
There was a fern flower quest in the woods for the
children too, and everybody present was encouraged to make
a wish while tying a ribbon to the hilechko, the decorated
branch which is traditionally burned as a symbolic
sacrifice. (In 2022, the custom was upheld by burning the
hilechko in a brazier on Brighton’s beach a couple of days
later.) The fern flower is a symbol of hope – and a
reminder that if a Ukrainian really found such a flower,
there would be no question about what their wish would be.
It is also an appeal to magic, echoed by the children’s
quest and the wish-tree, the reasons for which are
tragically obvious. The Sunday afternoon gathering among
the Preston Park trees was a ritual of collective
self-enchantment, telling a magical story about hope and
togetherness.
Not all the traditional characters took part. Effigies
of Kupalo, the male figure identified by the 17th-century
chronicler as a demon, often play the role of sacrificial
object that is assigned to the hilechko branch in
Brighton. Kupalo did not feature, and neither did Marena,
a female figure that plays a similar role in the midsummer
rituals. Other supernatural beings were there, though: two
restless female nature-spirits and a goddess. Playing the
role of a rusalka river spirit, Violetta Korbina explained
that such beings are the unquiet souls of women or girls,
whose lives or fates left them caught between the world of
the dead and the world of the living. Rusalka is an
unpredictable and potentially dangerous being, as is her
forest counterpart, Mavka. The third of the trio,
Mara, is a goddess of death.
Rusalka is known beyond the Slavic world as the central
character of the opera of the same name by the Czech
composer Antonin Dvořák, first performed in 1901. She also
appears in a celebrated work written ten years later by
Lesia Ukrainka, a major figure in 20th-century Ukrainian
literature. (The author’s surname is a nom de plume; it
means ‘Ukrainian woman’.) The Forest Song is a fairy drama
about the doomed love between the forest spirit Mavka and
a young man. Widely regarded as the founding text of
Ukrainian fantasy literature, it is a poetic meditation on
the relationship between humankind and the natural world.
At the Kupala festival, the spirit-figures played a
sharply different role in reflections about the effects of
human actions upon nature. The three characters stationed
themselves in front of information panels that took
visitors from the folkloric elements of Kupala to the
impact of Russian aggression on Ukraine’s culture, people
and environment. As a water spirit, Rusalka was given the
task of talking about the flooding caused by the
destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam a month previously.
The inseparability of tradition, history, culture and the
current war is a feature of all the Ukrainians’
performances and presentations in Sussex. They are
constantly striving to find ways to communicate with the
larger communities of which they have become part –
including addressing them in the guise of supernatural
beings from Ukrainian folklore. The most pressing reason
is the need to raise funds to support Ukraine, but their
efforts also express the strength of their desire to talk
about who they are and why they are here.
Mara, goddess of death, played by
Valerie Zabashta, and Mavka, the forest spirit, played
by Bohdana Storozuk. photo: Anastasiia Bohdanova
Kupala itself may become more closely integrated with
its new cultural landscape. In Brighton it has been
celebrated at the point that has become traditional in the
Ukrainian calendar, around July 6 or 7, putting it at a
remove from British and other European midsummer
festivals. Ivana Kupala became displaced from the summer
solstice through its nominal Christianisation, by which it
became tied to the Old Style calendar used by eastern
Orthodox churches. In the face of Russia’s imperialistic
insistence that Ukraine is not an authentic nation, the
old system of dates looks like a Russian frame that
distorts Ukraine’s symbolic calendar. Brighton’s Kupala
may follow Ukraine’s Christmas, which in 2023 was
officially detached from the traditional date of January 7
and moved to December 25 – a symbolic move towards
integration with the rest of Europe. Realigning Kupala
with midsummer will make it easier for the festival to be
seen, and practiced, as part of a shared cultural
tradition. As with folk music, there are rich
opportunities for intercultural exchange; not just with
British folkloric traditions, but also those of other
communities who celebrate midsummer and have a presence in
England.
Looking at Kupala from two different but strongly
compatible perspectives, Ukrainian and Anglo-Polish, while
participating in it at very different levels – leading
organiser and local volunteer helper – we see many other
possibilities in it. Our Kupala Brighton project aims to
use the Brighton Kupala Festival as a focus and a point of
departure for an exploration of the role of traditional
culture in contemporary Ukrainian society, both among
refugees and in the homeland – an exploration that will
offer striking perspectives on culture and identity across
Europe in general. It also aims to develop exchanges
beyond the festival itself, with writers, arts
practitioners and academics. If it’s successful, it will
lead to insights, analyses and reflective commentaries.
But it will remain the product of a shared enchantment,
with the flowers, the songs, the spirits and the conjured
sense of place that cast a midsummer spell over an English
city park.
Marek Kohn is a writer with an Anglo-Polish background, and lives in Brighton. His books include The Stories Old Towns Tell, Four Words for Friend (both published by Yale University Press) and Dope Girls (Granta). marekkohn.info
Vladyslava Bondar is a Ukrainian activist, culture
enthusiast and a cofounder of the Kupala Brighton
Festival and the Kupala Brighton project. She came to
Sussex as a refugee from Ukraine in April 2022, and
works in mental health and the refugee support sector.