Cossack Heritage in Ukraine

Video Transcript

Ukrainians are very proud of their national heroes, like Bohdan Khmelnytsky, I’d say. Hetman of Ukraine, I mean like ‘president’ in that time, for the cossack time. And also, another hetman Doroshenko, Ivan Mazepa, Foskyvan Sylko. It’s every era of cossack, cossack era. Taras Shevchenko, his great-grandfather, he was a cossack. You feel like you are a part of that. That’s the interesting thing, that for the whole Ukrainian history we were a part of something other, like Russia incurred, or the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but the cossack era was an era of freedom. They were fighting everybody, so they are really what Ukrainians are proud of. Everybody wanted to have some connection to that.

A Ukrainian national talks about the importance of Cossack heritage.