By Olha Chepil | 2026-04-27

Ukrainians are rewriting their cultural calendar. Victory Day -- the Soviet holiday Russia has long used as a pillar of cultural influence -- has collapsed from 30 percent participation to 12 percent in just four years. Christmas and Easter, both suppressed under Soviet rule, have surged to become the country's primary cultural anchors. No government decree drove the shift. Ukrainians are doing it themselves.

Research firm Gradus Research has tracked the change annually. Its findings show a society actively choosing which traditions to carry forward and which to leave behind, a renegotiation of identity accelerated by war, but rooted in something much older.

"As we see in the examples of European peoples, ethnic culture is vital for forming a nation," Yaroslava Muzychenko, an ethnologist and senior researcher at the Ivan Honchar Museum, told Kontur.

The reclamation has deep roots. For decades, Soviet authorities worked to dismantle Ukrainian traditional holidays. People's brigades patrolled on Easter night to stop churchgoers from blessing their paska bread. Schoolteachers forced children to show their hands during Holy Week -- anyone with egg dye on their fingers was punished. Circle dances were banned. Egg painting was forbidden. Russia later continued the pressure through the Moscow-aligned church.

It didn't work. Traditions survived because villages quietly preserved what was banned, passing practices from generation to generation. Now those practices are coming back -- openly, deliberately, and at scale.

Easter as proof

Easter offers the clearest measure of how far the revival has gone. Today 84 percent of Ukrainians say the holiday is an important part of their national identity. Gradus Research found that 95 percent celebrate it, making Easter not just a religious occasion but a mass cultural statement.

"People increasingly want to understand what exactly they're doing and why," Muzychenko said.

The shift is visible each spring in Kyiv, where hundreds gather outside St. Basil the Great Church wearing vyshyvanky -- traditional embroidered shirts -- and carrying baskets. Iryna Tymkiv arrives in a vyshyvanka more than a century old, preserved through two world wars and Soviet prohibition. It belonged to her husband's grandmother. Her sister crocheted the matching apron by hand. Tymkiv's mother is from eastern Ukraine, where Soviet authorities banned religious celebration. Now Tymkiv is deliberately picking up what was taken away -- baking Podolia-style paska from an old recorded recipe, rich with egg yolks and a technique that requires turning the loaf on its side fresh from the oven so it holds its shape.

"Now, following tradition, I'm supposed to hand it down to my daughter-in-law," Tymkiv told Kontur.

Almost every basket holds decorated eggs. Pysanky, eggs painted with intricate wax patterns, and krashenky, eggs dyed a single color, have long symbolized life and rebirth in Ukraine. Each line and symbol encoded in the wax carries meaning, functioning as a kind of visual language. Interest in the craft has grown sharply during the war, with master classes now held in schools, offices, and cultural venues across the country.

Amaliya Halimova, 9, attended classes at school, at city-run events, and at home.

"The first pysanka I made was a traditional one, with little birds, which are a symbol of life and spring. Then I made a modern one, with a cheetah," Amaliya told Kontur.

For Amaliya, this holiday is a way to start talking once again about Ukrainian traditions and an opportunity to perpetuate them in her own way, adding her own meanings to ancient symbols.

Beyond the churchyard

Easter has expanded well beyond religious observance. At the Sophia of Kyiv National Reserve, crowds gather each spring around the ancient cathedral for khorovods (circle dances) and gaivki -- the traditional Easter songs Soviet authorities once worked to suppress. Craftspeople display ceramics, jewelry, and wooden objects. Children play with bird whistles and hunt for eggs. Hundreds of veterans have joined the gaivki every year since the full-scale invasion began.

"Young people come dressed in beautiful traditional clothing, like our ancestors used to dress for holidays. It's a return to our old traditions," Marianna Kryzhanovska, the cultural event organizer at the reserve, told Kontur. "Nowadays despite the Shahed drones and missiles, here in our free and independent Ukraine we can mark the holiday, gather and remember our traditions."

In Lviv, thousands join similar celebrations each year. The pattern holds across the country, a society using its oldest traditions to answer the oldest kind of pressure.

Back in Kyiv each spring, the century-old vyshyvanka makes its appearance again -- outlasting wars, prohibitions, and invasion -- in the center of the capital, exactly where it belongs.