A group of kids shouted “glory to Ukraine” during a traditional baking activity that was part of the Ukrainian Community Week in Prudentópolis, a small town in southern Brazil.
Traditional Eastern European foods feature prominently during the annual weeklong festival that wrapped up this past weekend.
The town’s founders came from villages in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire — what is now western Ukraine — in the 1890s. At the time, the new Brazilian Republic was actively soliciting immigrants to open up farmland and colonize the countryside. The founders of Prudentópolis came to escape poverty, and other waves of Ukrainians followed.
“We can’t deny our roots,” said Oksana Jadvizak, who works with the city’s tourism department. “So, the week of the Ukrainian community is here to preserve and maintain our connection with Ukraine, to remember that this link still exists.”
In Prudentópolis, Ukrainian flags and other blue and yellow decorations can be found all over, while the Millennium Museum, founded in the 1980s, is devoted to the region’s immigrant roots. In recent years, the town has welcomed refugees displaced by the war in Ukraine.
Alciro Penteado is the owner of a local family restaurant that serves pierogies and other Ukrainian dishes alongside traditional Brazilian beans, rice and meat.
“Everyone here is either descended from Ukrainians or married to someone who’s descended from Ukrainians,” he said.
That also means that everyone here has paid close attention to the war in Ukraine.
“This war is really scary,” he said. “Everyone has family there. So, it really hurts. And every time we go to church, the father prays for Ukraine to find peace and for an end to the conflict.”
Penteado attends service at São Josafat, the main Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in town, though roughly 50 more Ukrainian-style churches dot the surrounding countryside. Services are in both Portuguese and Ukrainian.
Many of the townspeople say that their ties to their homeland have become even stronger since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Vitalii Arshulik is a Ukranian missionary who came to Prudentópolis a few years before the war to start the town’s First Baptist Church. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Arshulik helped to receive Ukrainian refugees arriving in Brazil.
“My family only has one car. And when I was coming home from helping the Ukranians, I wasn’t even turning it off, and my wife was getting in and going out to help someone else,” he said. “Someone would have a toothache, or the shower would be broken, or the hot water wasn’t working. Or someone would need emotional support.”
The 27 refugees who came to Prudentópolis were women and children fleeing violence. Today, most of them have now returned to Europe to be closer to their family members who couldn’t leave the country.
Only one woman decided to stay — 41-year-old Yuliia Antiukhova, who is from the Donetsk region of Ukraine, which has been at the center of the conflict with Russia. She said it was hard to say goodbye to the others who came with her from Ukraine, but she feels she’s in the right place.
“I am so happy that God led my way to Prudentópolis,” she said. “A city with a Ukrainian soul. A city of Ukrainian descendants. A small, calm city, like where I come from in the Ukraine. And God surrounded me with so many wonderful people that I don’t feel alone.”