Lifestyle
Far from the front lines, Ukrainians fight a war to preserve their culture
In a remote region of western Ukraine, far from where the violent conflict of war with Russia is taking place and destroying human lives, Ukrainians are fighting a different type of battle: for culture and dignity.
In this area of Transcarpathia, a historical region in Eastern Europe that is now primarily part of modern-day Ukraine, there are local residents holding onto their history, traditional lifestyle, crafts and cultural identity. After coming under threat during Soviet times, they face stark new dangers. Since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ukrainians have feared that he is determined to wipe out their culture and statehood. Millions of Ukrainians have left the country. Many others have joined the army — with many killed on the front lines — and war efforts have soaked up people’s energy and resources. As they defend their territory from advancing Russian forces, many in Ukraine are also fighting to preserve a cultural heritage in peril.
The Transcarpathian Folk Choir performs a song and dance for a music video that they are working on to share their music. Ukraine’s St. Miklos Castle, which is now an arts exhibit space, a meeting place and museum for local history, provides the backdrop.
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Like many in this region, Joseph Bartosh, 67, believes he’s fighting on a sort of cultural front line. “In 2000,” Bartosh says, “my war actually started that year.” That was when Bartosh started his effort to preserve the medieval St. Miklos Castle in the town of Chynadiiovo, Ukraine. When he began the project, the castle was in disrepair. He says he found signs that in Soviet times, it had been used as a horse stable, with a lack of respect given to its history.
St. Miklos Castle in Chynadiiovo, Ukraine, was in disrepair when Joseph Bartosh decided to work on restoring it. He says that during Soviet times, it was used as a horse stable. Even now, more than 20 years since he started the project, there is still more work to be done to preserve parts of the castle.
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Joseph Bartosh stands in a patch of window light at St. Miklos Castle in Chynadiiovo, a town in western Ukraine. Since 2000, he’s taken on the effort of restoring the medieval castle, whose earliest known mention is believed to be around 1450.
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With the restoration well underway, the inside has already been transformed into a space for art exhibitions, community events and a museum where people can learn about the castle’s history. During this visit by NPR, the Transcarpathian Folk Choir is performing in the castle’s yard and filming for a music video, as Bartosh closes up for the day.
The Transcarpathian Folk Choir performs a dance while filming a music video.
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There are instances throughout Ukraine’s history in which the people were spurred into action to preserve their culture. Villagers here remember the Soviet history of Ukraine as a time of erasure of unique regional traditions. Hanna Haiduk recalls her relatives having to hide their embroidered shirts, called a vyshyvanka, to save them from being destroyed by Soviet troops. “People were putting [vyshyvankas] inside of glass jars, sealing those jars, digging holes underground trying to hide those vyshyvankas there. And people were trying to save vyshyvanka for years for the next generations in this way,” Haiduk recounts over tea in her kitchen.
Hanna Haiduk grew up learning traditional Hutsul embroidery techniques. She is part of the Hutsul ethnic group from the Transcarpathian region, which is mainly part of modern-day Ukraine.
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Haiduk, 60, is from the Hutsul ethnic group, from a village in the Carpathian Mountains called Kosivska. She remembers learning to embroider as a child, alongside her whole community. They would often gather under one large tree in the village to work on communal projects, chatting and laughing together as she and other kids would help, and learning different embroidery techniques as their parents directed them. They embroidered towels, rugs and vyshyvankas.
Hanna Haiduk uses a needle and thread to form intricate designs, many of which she copies from historical works she finds in books or those she saved from her family’s past work.
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Haiduk passed her love of tradition to her eldest son, Taras. He was a tour guide, showing off regional culture to people from around the world. He was killed while serving in the Ukrainian army, just one month after the war began in 2022, at age 34. He was supportive of her work and, before his death, he was building a website for Haiduk, to help her sell her vyshyvankas. But he never got to finish it, she says. She recounts all this with tears in her eyes.
“The war touches everywhere in this country; it’s a misconception that we are free from it here,” Haiduk says.
Hanna Haiduk does her embroidery mostly at home in Uzhhorod, a city in western Ukraine. She lost her son when he went to fight at the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
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But not every part of the region’s cultural heritage has been successfully preserved, as the war has taken its toll.
Richka is known locally as the village that makes hunias, traditional fluffy wool coats. Olha Mys and her mother and sisters used to make hunias, but the tradition is dying out. Even before the war, Mys says, fewer people were producing and wearing hunias because of how time-consuming and meticulous it is to make them.
“It’s not easy work to do this,” Mys says.
Olha Mys, wearing a fluffy wool hunia coat, and her sister walk near their house in Richka, Ukraine, down to where a valylo is built into the side of a stream. They use the valylo to wash wool and then to wash hunias for hours after they are woven.
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Making a hunia takes months just to complete one coat. After gathering the sheep’s wool, it is washed and dried in the sun, then combed and woven on a loom that takes up an entire room. The woven fabric is then washed for multiple hours in a valylo, a kind of natural washing machine that people construct on the side of a mountain stream. Valylos can only be used when the stream is very full and the water runs clear to keep dirt out of the materials. The hours of washing in the valylo helps with felting the woven fabric, creating a material that is dense and spongy.
Olha Mys shows a photo of her grandmother wearing a hunia. The tradition of crafting the coats has been in the family for generations.
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Many people have moved out of Richka, a small village in western Ukraine. Villagers estimate more than half of the population has left since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
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Adding to the difficulties, the war has shrunk the population of Richka, as people have fled Ukraine altogether. Many people in the village, roughly counting their neighbors, estimate that over half have left since the war started nearly three years ago.
Lubov Hychka, who still occasionally makes hunias, says that this population drop affects the materials she needs for the process.
“All those people that left because of the war, many of them had sheep, even despite the fact they weren’t producing hunias,” Hychka says. “When they left they sold their sheep or rented them to people in other villages, in other areas. Now if you want to start to produce hunia, you don’t have this amount of choice [in wool].”
Wool from local sheep is used in making a hunia.
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Lubov Hychka demonstrates how to weave the hunia fabric while Vasyl Hychka (unrelated), who takes care of the property where the loom is housed, helps with the rickety old machine.
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Traditionally, large flocks of sheep used to ramble through the Carpathian Mountains, spending summers on wide alpine meadows while shepherds lived alongside them. Now they dot the area, with usually just a few nibbling on grasses together on the outskirts of each village.
Mikhailo Bilak sits to smoke a cigarette after walking all morning with his flock of sheep. Mykola Yakbuk (right) has come to take one of the ewes and her lambs back to a barn where they can be more closely cared for.
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Mikhailo Bilak, a man wearing knee-high mud boots, watches over his flock of more than a hundred sheep. He says he and his friend, Mykola Yakbuk, are some of the rare shepherds who still raise sheep in this way, grazing them near the village of Yavoriv.
Mikhailo Bilak holds two lambs while their mother looks on.
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Even on this remote mountaintop, the war still looms. At 59, Bilak has nearly aged out of the military draft, which goes up to 60, but the country’s mobilization remains a threat.
“Pretty much if they mobilize me, these sheep will be packed immediately for slaughterhouse. Nobody will take care of them,” Bilak says bluntly, before he runs after his moving flock down the mountain, waving goodbye and apologizing at the hasty exit.
A few villages away in Krasnoillya, a small wooden museum is tucked into a valley that curls around a flowing stream, between the pine-covered peaks of the mountains. In the museum, actors who perform Hutsul theater are having a modest feast after rehearsal. A variety of cured meats and cheeses are stacked on thick, buttered slices of white bread.
Vasyl Zhykaliak, 15, and his 11-year-old brother, Dmytro, prepare to rehearse a play at Hutsul Theater.
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Their kind of theater was created over 100 years ago based on the culture and stories of the Hutsul ethnic group, who live in these mountains. The theater nearly went extinct during both World War I and II, but each time, after a long hiatus, dedicated enthusiasts revived it once the wars ended. During the current war, they have fewer shows and rehearsals, but still on an average Sunday in early November they were able to gather a handful of performers to rehearse.
Volodymyr Sinitovych, director of the Hutsul Theater, greets his son and grandchild outside the small museum in Krasnoillya, where the history of Hutsul theater is documented and sometimes performed.
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“I don’t think that it can cease to exist this time,” says Roman Sinitovych, the museum director and one of the actors in the troupe. He says this is because people have learned from the past. They care more about preserving cultural identity during this war. Sinitovych served in the territorial defense in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region during the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion, but upon returning home, he went straight back to acting.
The difficulties during wartime never dampen his optimism.
“Many people say, ‘Oh, it’s a war now, it’s a difficult time. Why do you need plays? Why do you need to perform?’ But you know actually we need, because those are the things that unite us, that keep us together.”
They pour shots of a local alcohol made with galangal, making enthusiastic toasts to meeting, to friendship and to love. And one last time before parting, the sweet notes of a flute waft through the air. The group embraces, singing and spinning in a large circle, round and round until they merge into a blur.
Volodymyr Sinitovych ties up traditional shoes that are part of his costume.
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After rehearsal, the theater troupe has drinks and shares some meats and cheeses together.
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Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
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When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
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Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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