For over a decade, Yaroslav Simkiv’s gig at town hall in Lviv, Ukraine, was simple. He would don his costume, perch himself near a high-up window and play the city’s song on his trumpet.
Simkiv’s performances were a festive way to mark the time periodically in a city that sees a lot of tourists.
But these days, Simkiv’s job has gotten harder amid the war with Russia. For the near-daily funeral processions that pass by the town hall, the veteran musician, clad in a red jacket and stationed on the street, performs the somber melody, “Il Silenzio,” by Nini Rosso, to honor the country’s fallen soldiers.
“You don’t get used to it,” 68-year-old Simkiv said — he closes his eyes to get through the song each and every time. “It is very difficult to live through this. It’s not difficult to play. They are young people who would have been the future of Ukraine.”
Ukraine doesn’t disclose the number of its soldiers who’ve been killed on the battlefield, nor does Russia, but The New York Times, citing US government officials in August of 2023, reported that the total number of troops killed or wounded from both sides since the war began neared 500,000 at that time.
The daily funeral processions in Lviv — and Simkiv’s performances — are just one example of how, in the face of war, Ukrainians are increasingly turning to funeral rites and mourning traditions. Some of these practices are rooted in old traditions, while others are a reinvention, according to observers. Altogether, these rituals are part of a larger story about the reclamation of Ukrainian culture and identity.
Simkiv is no stranger to playing at military funerals. He served 20 years in the military orchestra in Lviv during the Soviet era. During the war in Afghanistan in the 1970s, he said, they played the Soviet national anthem, and a salute was fired. Ukrainian music was forbidden.
Under the Soviet regime, burials were completely different, he said, adding that Ukrainian traditions began to reemerge in the late 1980s.
“It is important to understand that we are now burying soldiers in our country. This is significant. We sing our national anthem,” said Oksana Kuzmenko, a senior scholar at The Ethnology Institute in Lviv.
“These funeral processions remind you that you are in the war,” she said.
Like the World War I-era song, “Oh, the Red Viburnum in the Meadow,” which has become an anthem for the current moment and also demonstrates how older Ukrainian traditions are merging with newer ones.
Liudmyla Ivannikova is a folklorist at the Maksym Rylsky Institute of Art History, Folklore and Ethnology in Kyiv. She has studied Ukrainian music traditions for 40 years and believes that music traditions have served as an important thread throughout Ukraine’s troubled history.
“There is a war here, people are dying. And folk songs give this connection to that history, to show that it’s not just a war that happened out of the blue,” Ivannikova said.
Some distinctly Ukrainian musical traditions have revived in recent years as people have mourned loved ones lost to Russian aggression — traditions like holosinnia, a folk lament. In the 1980s and 1990s, the practice was fading in the villages.
“But what struck me when the war broke out in 2014, and when they started bringing dead soldiers back from Donbas, then the people’s lamentations began to revive en masse,” in villages and cities, she said.
“Because all mothers were lamenting, wives were lamenting as much as they could. Sisters, even young sisters, quite young women, were all crying,” she said.
Also making a comeback are kobzars, musicians who go through years of training and make their own instruments that have a designation through UNESCO. As far back as the 16th century, kobzars were wandering bards who played a variety of uniquely Ukrainian instruments — like the up-to-12-stringed kobza and the bandura, which can have dozens of strings. Modern-day kobzars are increasingly being asked to play at military funerals. They often play songs known as dumy, epic poems that tell of Ukrainian history and past battles.
“These songs have a very archaic, deep character and they touch the most subtle, deepest aspects of the human soul and the Ukrainian soul,” Ivannikova said.
Vitaliy Kobzar, whose last name is a happy coincidence for a Ukrainian musician, said he playsa duma, the singular form of dumy, on an instrument he made from willow. He said completing it took him one year, six months and 22 days.
“When the Soviet Union was here, they started using brass bands at funerals,” he said. “But Ukrainian funerals never had anything like that before. We need to return to our own musical traditions,” he said.
Taras Kompanichenko, a kobzar and bandura player, is the leader of the band Khoreya Kozatska.
“We want kobzars to fulfill the same functions that they did in ancient Ukrainian culture: to awaken people’s national dignity, knowledge of Ukrainian history, admiration and interest in this history, and universal values,” said Kompanichenko, a junior sergeant in the armed forces who joined the military in February 2022, just days after Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Kompanichenko, who was born and raised in Kyiv, said that playing Ukrainian folk instruments was rare enough that his classmates laughed at him for choosing the bandura over a guitar. But his decision proved to be prescient.
“Well, I play, unfortunately, at funerals not only in times of war,” he said. “It was already one of my services. But the culture of Ukrainian burial is just as important as the culture of Ukrainian weddings, as the culture of Ukrainian baptisms. That is, the arrival of a person into the world and the departure of a person.”
Since becoming a soldier, he said, he’s played many funerals, including some for men in his brigade.
“Someone said we never thought that these songs, these historical songs would be about us,” he said. “And these songs are about us.”