In Kyiv, outside St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, there is a long blue wall bearing photographs of thousands and thousands of Ukrainians: the faces of soldiers, police officers, and volunteers who have died—some since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and some from when the war truly started in 2014. One day last spring, near the end of the wall in front of the monastery’s bell tower, a young man sat with a large lute-style instrument called a bandura in his lap. Beside him stood his instructor with some sheet music. The young man was the latest in a long line of bards known as kobzars. These wandering musicians have sung Ukrainian folk music for hundreds of years.
The man’s dulcet tones filled the town square as he sang a song called “Oh, the Red Viburnum in the Meadow,” made iconic by the Sich Riflemen in the early twentieth century. “Oh, in the meadow a red viburnum has bent down low / For some reason, our glorious Ukraine is in sorrow / And we’ll take that red viburnum and we will raise it up,” the song goes, according to one translation. “And we shall cheer for glorious Ukraine, hey-hey.”
