Most countries have one anthem. Ukraine has a second song it reaches for when it wants to pray for itself rather than march.
A prayer set to music
In 1885, the writer Oleksandr Konysky wrote the words to Prayer for Ukraine — Боже великий, єдиний, "Lord, O great and almighty." The composer Mykola Lysenko, the father of Ukrainian classical music, set it to a hymn tune the same year. It was written for children at first, and it spread.
Ukraine's spiritual anthem
Today it is often called Ukraine's spiritual anthem. It closes church services. It is sung at state occasions and memorials. Where the national anthem is a vow — "Ukraine has not yet perished" — this is a prayer: keep our Ukraine, give her freedom and light, bless her people. It asks, rather than declares.
Why a prayer, now
A hymn asking God to "keep our Ukraine" lands very differently when the country is under daily attack. Konysky wrote it under the Russian Empire, at a time when printing and teaching in Ukrainian was being actively suppressed. More than a century later, the same language and the same culture are again being targeted — and the same quiet song is still being sung. Printing it, and wearing it, is a small way of keeping it heard.
Wear it
Our Prayer for Ukraine tee sets an art-nouveau emblem of golden wheat on deep azure — Ukraine's blue and gold — with the opening bar of Lysenko's melody hand-set as gilded notation, the first line in Ukrainian and English, and the full prayer on the back beside its translation. NZ$5 from every shirt in our Ukrainian line goes to Kiwi K.A.R.E Ukraine and UNITED24 Medical Aid.
Read next
Zapovit, the poem Ukraine sings like an anthem · Why we print words a regime tried to erase — or browse Poems for Ukraine.
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