We love simple numbers. They give an illusion of clarity. Thirty-four years, and it would seem everything is said. But nations do not live within the boundaries of calendars, for they exist in subtler dimensions—memory, imagination, language, or even the repeated gestures of everyday life. That is why the answer to a childlike, yet profoundly adult question—“So how old are we?”—depends on what exactly we are measuring: the state as an institution or continuity as a genetic experience.
This time we celebrate 34 years of Independence—the next, and so far the longest, of modern attempts by Ukrainians to live within their own borders under their own rules. But this is not the age of Ukraine. It is only the age of one chapter in a book that has many volumes.
Let us not begin with borders and coats of arms, but with the land, where thousands of years ago cultures existed that left us pottery with mysterious ornaments, settlement plans, traces of rituals and grains. The Trypillians were not Ukrainians in the modern sense, nor did they have a state. Yet this is the memory of matter itself about the first horizon approached by archaeologists when they enlarge the scale of time.
Nomadic, Iranian-speaking Scythians—linguistically and politically alien—left us, for example, the burial mounds that still rise from our steppes. They are not our direct ancestors, but they left us their landscape of memory. The attempt to forbid us to recall them as part of our depth is an attempt to impose a narrow definition of nationhood as merely a passport entry. But a nation is also the geology of its own memory, where ancient strata do not dissolve but become the foundation for new forms.
Cimmerians, Sarmatians, Greek poleis on the coasts, Roman influences, Gothic traces: behind each category stands a territory populated by history, where forms of life, skills, and beliefs were exchanged. The axis of Ukrainian-ness is so deep that it vanishes into prehistoric darkness. And this is not a propagandist stance, but an elementary intellectual tact toward one’s place in the “long durée.”
As we come closer, from the darkness of antiquity emerges the figure of a city on a river: Kyiv. The chronicle year 882 is a morphological leap: political organization, law, centers of gravity, diplomacy, a name heard far beyond our fields. Kyivan Rus’ is not “Ukraine” in terms of the modern state, but it is a form of our state tradition, a kind of matrix to which we returned and which was taken from us. And then came other morphologies: the Halych-Volhynian Principality with its western vector, the Cossack Hetmanate as a military-political experiment of freedom under imperial pressure, and the modern, dramatically short-lived but fundamental Ukrainian People’s Republic and Western Ukrainian People’s Republic—the first articulation of the right to a state in the languages of the twentieth century. Every time we are accused of being a “young state,” we can always appeal to the shifting geometry of our statehood. Colonial scars interrupted these institutions, but never interrupted communities of memory (how could we not recall Jan Assmann here), language as home, the church as shelter, and custom as archive.
Yes, nations can be called imagined communities, but not invented ones. It means that community is constructed through texts, songs, rituals, schools, armies—and in our case, through eternal resistance to appropriation. The empire for centuries tried to rewrite us as “Little Russians,” to erase our voice from the chronicle. But nations are not killed by textbooks, imposed pseudo-culture, or social media swarms of bots. They are killed by war, famine, and shootings. And even then, they return.
Inferiority does not arise from thin air. It is produced by centuries of political practice: banning the language as a devaluation of thought; ridiculing the “village” as a way to humiliate culture; appropriating Kyivan Rus’ as a mechanism of uprooting. Empire (even now) stands on someone else’s amnesia: if you forget your own, you will trust the foreign. This method worked for a long time, and it is not shameful to admit that it gnawed at Ukrainians mercilessly. We laughed at ourselves—tired, confused, reshaped by foreign templates—and at the same time carried amulets in our pockets: carols, embroidered shirts, samizdat, mother’s whisper “you will grow up, my son….” In these small things, in these quasi-patterns, continuity was preserved.
The full-scale war did something paradoxical. Exposing all the weaknesses, flaws, and sins of Ukrainians, it erased the need for inferiority. So you boldly begin to respond: to rockets—with drones of your own design; to imperial blackmail—with broad diplomacy and support from communities; to death—with life, creativity, and language. You no longer need to borrow a voice or avert your eyes. Nationhood, as a daily plebiscite, continues for Ukrainians in real time: on the front, in donations, in the classroom, at choir rehearsal, in the laboratory or the newsroom.
So do we have the right to say that we are one of the oldest in Europe? Yes, if we understand exactly what we assert. The Ukrainian historical experience unfolds on a territory where cultural layers are not interrupted but accumulate. Thus Rus’ is precisely our form of early statehood and our radius of civilizational continuity, with all chronicles that are ours, and all temples that are not “offshoots” of something foreign, but our own trunk.
The age of Ukraine in the strict sense cannot be totaled. There is the age of continuous modern independence—34 years. There is the age of the state tradition, from 882—over a thousand years. There is the age of the cultural space, which dies in the archaeological darkness of several millennia, from where it is recovered not by officials, but by archaeologists, ethnologists, and historians of religion. And there is also the age of memory, which cannot be calculated. It does not live in years, but in transmission.
Isn’t this the sense in which Ukrainians are immortal? Not because people do not die, but because none of the threads we know how to pass on are ever broken.
After speaking of eternity, it is very easy to slip into hypertrophied grandeur. This stance is not only comical but also dangerous, as it copies the imperial trick. Those who stood with kobzas by the roadside singing of truth where foreign rules swarmed did not boast of greatness. Nor did those who ran Prosvita, who worked in underground universities and tiny printing presses. Nor those who quietly and stubbornly preserved language at home where another one blared from the TV. None flaunted grandeur in letters from Siberian exile or in silent prayers in Ukrainian. When you must hide flags, icons, and embroidery, only common meanings remain—and we exist.
Arnold Toynbee taught us to look at civilizations as responses to challenges. Our current challenge is not only to defend borders, restore infrastructure, and punish evil. It is broader: to break the cycle of the appropriation of our past and finally self-appropriate it—without excuses through foreign myths. For this we need not only academies and ministries, but a living ecosystem of memory: museums, communities, media, schools, parishes, IT initiatives, family archives, amateur groups, volunteer networks. We need to preserve this hum of countless transmitters: from a schoolteacher in Philadelphia to engineers in Cupertino printing parts for drones, from a priest in Newark to a stand-up comic in Chicago, from a historian at Harvard to a biker in Miami who suddenly began writing prose in her grandfather’s tongue. In this network there is and never will be a center—only polyphony.
That is why the American experience of Ukrainians is so valuable. It is a separate school of duration, where everyone learned to be themselves without overseers. Here institutions were born that outlived several Ukrainian states and several foreign empires: parishes, credit unions, cultural societies, Plast scouting units, media.
Among all these long durations—there is one small date. Our little newsroom, Vilni Media, has turned one year old. This is nothing on the scale of millennia, and very much in wartime, when every channel of transmission matters. We appeared to do something simple: to help Ukrainians in the U.S. stay together, hear one another, and speak to the world in their own voice. In this year authors from different cities joined us, organizations approached us—not for PR, but for community. We make projects, argue, make mistakes, and learn. And we know for certain that we reflect reality as it is. And this is needed.
So how old are we, Ukrainians?
Neither the calendar nor the clock will give the answer. Better to ask differently: how old is the song you sang to your child today? How old is the gesture of crossing oneself, or the recipe for borshch? How old is the language in which we think and love? That is our true age.
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