Ukrainian Canadian - A site for cossack canucks

A great time was had by all last night at Centennial Park in Etobicoke.  Check out some pictures from the event:

Saturday & Sunday

• Chicago, IL - 25th annual Ukrainian Days Festival - Smith Park, 2500 West Grand Avenue
• Glen Spey, NY - Ukrainian Independence Day celebration ‘Verkhovyna’ - Mountainview Resort, 369 High Rd at 2pm

Saturday

• Toronto, ON - Ukraine’s Independance Day Festival - Centennial Park, Etobicoke
• Davis, CA - Ukrainian Festival - Veterans Center Theatre & Hall, 203 East 14th St
• Saskatoon, SK - Ukraine Day - Kiwanis Park, 601 Spadina Cres. E, 9am - 9pm

Sunday

• Toms River, NJ - 1st annual Ukrainian Festival - St. Stephen Ukrainian Catholic Church,1344 White Oak Bottom Rd, 12-7pm
  Horsham, PA - Ukrainian Folk Festival 2008 -Tryzub Sports Center, County Line & Lower State Rds., at noon
• Buffalo, NY - Ukrainian Day - Dnipro Center , 562 Genesee Street at 1pm
• San Francisco, CA - Ukrainian Day in Golden Gate Park - at 1pm
• Silver Spring, MD - Independence Day Picnic Celebration - St. Andrew’s Chruch, 15100 New Hampshire Ave. at 1pm

Am I missing a festival?  Let me know in the comments!

They rallied at Queen’s Park today in Toronto to commemorate the 17th year of Independence for Ukraine. Some great speeches were head by Borys Wrzesnewskyj and Peggy Nash as well as a few others. Check out some pictures of the event:

The exhibit runs from November 29, 2008 to March 22, 2009. artdaily has a great write-up on it:

ONTARIO.- This Fall, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) presents Mysteries of Ancient Ukraine: the Remarkable Trypilian Culture (5400 – 2700 BC), the world’s first large scale exhibition uncovering the secrets of this ancient society which existed in present day Ukraine 7,000 – 5,000 years ago. The mystery of this compelling and sophisticated culture, known for creating the largest settlements anywhere in the world at the time, only to inexplicably disappear, is illuminated through some 300 artifacts, many never before seen in North America. The exhibition is on display in the Museum’s 3rd floor Centre Block from Saturday, November 29, 2008 to Sunday, March 22, 2009.

With Ukraine’s First Lady, Mrs. Kateryna Yushchenko serving as honorary patron, Mysteries of Ancient Ukraine: the Remarkable Tryplian Culture (5400 – 2700 BC) is organized by the ROM in collaboration with the National Museum of the History of Ukraine (Kyiv, Ukraine), the Institute of Archaeology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the Archaeological Museum of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the Odessa Archaeological Museum, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and the Vinnytsia Regional Museum (Ukraine). The exhibition is based on artifacts first discovered by Ukrainian archaeologist Vikenty Khvoika in 1896, including tools, items of adornment, ceramic figures, earthenware portraits, and pottery. Trypilian pottery, with its sophisticated decorative schemes, attractive forms and fine execution, is generally recognized as second to none in the Neolithic world.

• Remember Russia’s accusations of Georgia committing “genocide” in South Ossetia to justify invasion?  Turned out to be a big fat lie:

Russian-backed leaders in South Ossetia have said that 2,100 people died in fighting in Tskhinvali and nearby villages. But a doctor at the city’s main hospital, the only one open during the battles that began late on Aug. 7, said the facility recorded just 40 deaths.

That explanation, that Russians were saving South Ossetians from total annihilation, undergirded Moscow’s rationale for the invasion.

A senior member of Russia’s parliament, Konstantin Zatulin also said that the Russian government intended to spend some $100 million on building a “Moscow district” in the city (Tskhinvali, Georgia); he did not explain what that would entail.

Georgia’s leadership maintains the war was launched by the Kremlin because of longstanding resentment about the former Soviet republic’s close ties with the West.

Of course it’s not like they haven’t lied before.

• Russia has been accused of handing out its passports to residents in Crimea to stoke another separatist movement.
• President Yushchenko has accused Prime Minister Tymoshenko of high treason by not speaking out against the Kremlin in the conflict and plotting to use a deepening crisis with Moscow to take over as president.
• Ukraine is ready to make its missile warning defence system available to Europe.
• A lady in Glenside, PA has grown a 9-foot tall sunflower to be the the symbol of her graduate Holodomor class at Kean University in Union, N.J.
• The 36th annual Ukrainian Festival was held in Irondequoit near Rochester, NY on Saturday as well as the 33rd annual Ukrainian Festival in Middletown, NY.
• Ukraine has propped itself up to 10th place with a slew of medals, including Oleksandr Petriv setting an Olympic record in men’s 25-metre rapid fire pistol.
• Remember how the Orthodox church said it didn’t want to get political?
• Madonna’s 50th birthday apparently quite the news in Ukraine.
• ‘Hutsul’s Year‘ a much talked about play in Edinburgh had to be cancelled after the lead actress was knocked down and seriously hurt.  ‘Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors‘ will air at the Nairm film festival.

The Shaw Festival is a major Canadian theatre festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario founded in 1962 as a salute to Irish Playwright George Bernard Shaw.  The Globe and Mail noticed how this year among others the lack of diversity among actors, which mirrored Shaw’s own beliefs:

Shaw was a Stalinist and helped whitewash the Ukrainian Holodomor…

From his Wikipedia page:

After visiting the USSR in the 1930s where he met Stalin, Shaw became an ardent supporter of the Stalinist USSR. The preface to his play On the Rocks (1933) is primarily an effort to justify the pogroms conducted by the OGPU. In an open letter to the Manchester Guardian, he dismisses stories of a Soviet famine as slanderous and calls reports of its exploited workers falsehoods.^[57] Asked why he did not stay permanently in the Soviet ‘earthly paradise’, Shaw jokingly explained that England was a hell and he was a small devil. He wrote a defense of Stalin’s espousal of Lysenkoism in a letter to Labour Monthly.

You can download the play here, it should be in the public domain in Canada.

Edit:  I found a lot more information online.  Very scary to know we have a festival for a man who believed Auschwitz was caused by overcrowding.

From Ucrainica (UK):

Online resources

• Read Ukrainian! — an online course of interactive materials designed to support the acquisition of reading skills in Ukrainian. www.lww-cetl.ac.uk/ukrainian

• Laboratory drills — online audio exercises from the Slavic Department of the University of Toronto. lab.chass.utoronto.ca/slavic/Ukrainian/SLA208

• I haven’t been able to keep up to date on the Georgia-Russia conflict, luckily Cyber Cossack hasn’t missed a beat.  There has been a lot of news coverage despite the Olympics.
• Ukraine picked up its first medal - Roman Gontiuk won the bronze in Judo (Men’s 81kg).  Sergiy Derevyanchenko advanced in boxing but others are not favouring so well due to the alledged bias of officials.
• Ukrainianization is flourishing!
  

  The number of schools using Russian as the language of instruction is rapidly diminishing even in Russian-speaking areas, and higher education is conducted in Ukrainian…   Ukrainian state television only broadcasts in Ukrainian, and the presence of Russian in radio and television is minimal, though many still rely on broadcasts from Russia... The progressing Ukrainianisation of the country has left many Russian speakers uncomfortable, but for several decades it was Ukrainians who complained of language discrimination, and only slowly has the Slavic language begun to erase the ‘peasant language’ tag.

• Last week, a Ukrainian Catholic Church in Utica, NY was broken into where the thieves broke the tabernacle to steal a gold plated chalice and incense burner. There have been no leads in the investigation (video)
• Thirty Ukrainian orphans arrived in the Orange County in hopes of being adopted by American families and educating them on their plight.
• Tufts University graduate students have launched the Child’s Right to Thrive Student Group leading a grass-roots effort to improve the lives of children living in congregate care in Ukraine among other countries.
• Kindness in Action, a nonprofit from Severna Park, MD, that sponsors an orphanage in Lviv, delivered 17 quilts during a visit from June 13 to July 3.
• This week’s Nash Holos (Vancouver) and Ukrainian Time (Montreal) radio shows are available to download.

From UNIAN:

Last night, the very popular FOX TV show “So You Think You Can Dance” (watched by millions and millions of viewers) featured two of this year`s top male dancers wearing Ukrainian folk costumes and dancing a hopak while presenting it as a Russian dance “trepak.” The lame excuse that such a dance was used by Tchaikovsky in his ballet “The Nutcracker” does not justify such a glaring misinformation on the part of the producers and, in particular, a Russian choreographer who prepared this dance!

The League of Ukrainian Canadians have provided a petition to sign and are encouraging viewers to write to FOX tonight to have them acknowledge the error before tonight’s finale. Already available is a clip from last night’s dance.

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