Kupala Brighton
We invite guests to tell us a little about how they work with folklore. This is a guest blog post by Marek Kohn and Vladyslava Bondar from Kupala Brighton.
Kupala isn’t a familiar name in England, but with its bonfires, dancing and magical rituals, the Ukrainian festival is immediately recognisable. It’s part of the great family of midsummer festivals that span Europe when the nights are shortest, from Estonia to Portugal and from Greece to Ireland. Refugees from Ukraine have now brought their traditions with them to Britain, and Kupala has joined the medley of celebrations that bloom in England at midsummer. From flower crowns to amulet dolls and decorated eggs, folklore, traditions and crafts are an important part of the symbolism and images that the new Ukrainian communities use to represent and sustain themselves. They have become steadily more important and widely embraced as the Russian aggression against Ukraine has grown.
Making flower crowns 2025. Photo: Marek Kohn.
The finished crowns! Vladyslava Bondar is in the centre, with blue hair. Photo: Marek Kohn.
All of them came together in the Kupala festival that took place in Brighton’s Preston Park a few months after the refugees began to arrive in 2022. It brought enchantment to a Victorian city park – despite the absence of Kupala’s two essential elements: fire, which is prohibited under park safety regulations, and flowing water, traditionally used as a divination medium by unmarried women who observe where it carries their flower crowns, for clues about their future husbands. Workarounds had to be devised. Instead of leaping over a bonfire, people held hands and jumped over bands of red cloth – which became a new local custom in subsequent years.
The Kupala festival in Brighton, 2023. Photo: Manal Gharzeddin.
The 2022 Kupala festival was also the first major outdoor gathering that brought the newly arrived Ukrainians together, and it played an important role in bringing them together as a community. Folk-dance sessions and craft workshops helped British people to see what Ukrainian culture looks like, and helped many Ukrainians to become more practiced in it. The midsummer spell created a moment of shared imagination in which all this could happen.
Making flower crowns. Photo: Maryna Litvinova.
That spell wasn’t cast by experts in folklore, but by ordinary people who wove together the textures, scraps and threads of what they knew or recalled about how to celebrate Kupala. Our impulse to explore Ukrainian traditions further was part of our motivation to start our Kupala Brighton project. (One of us, Vladyslava Bondar, was the Brighton & Hove festival’s lead organiser for its first three years.) We particularly want to explore what roles folk traditions play in Ukrainian communities today, and how those communities reshape them to meet their needs, wherever they are.
Vladyslava Bondar, in the foreground, organising the 2023 Kupala festival in Brighton. Photo: Marek Kohn.
And we also want to help interweave Kupala with the other midsummer festivals that take place in England, not to mention the rest of Europe. One step in that venture is to actually celebrate it at midsummer. When the pagan festival was appropriated by the Christian church, it was attached to St John’s Eve and named after it – Ivana, of John, Kupala, the Baptist. The calendar used by Orthodox churches has pushed the date back to July, drawing Kupala away from the rest of Europe in the process. This year we celebrated it on the weekend of the solstice, in a small nature reserve of wetlands that resemble Kupala’s natural Ukrainian habitat, finding a new place for it in the mosaic of English lands, traditions and cultures.
Ukrainian food at the 2023 Kupala festival in Brighton. Photo: Best Foot Music.