HOMIN

 245210.11.2006

The “Homin” ethnographic choir arose in Kyiv in 1989, meeting illegally in different buildings and on the banks of the Dnipro [Dnieper] River. It promoted folk songs, national festivals and customs, carols, New Year songs, songs to greet the spring, the Ivan Kupala Festival (Midsummer), etc.  It was a milieu which gathered members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, in which patriotic sentiments dominated and samvydav [samizdat] was circulated. The choir sang near the Monument to Taras Shevchenko on 22 May and its members were as a result subjected to all kinds of discrimination. The permanent leader of the choir was the art specialist Leopold Yashchenko who was in 1971 expelled from the Union of Composers for “ideological errors committed in leading a choir”, and the choir itself was dissolved as nationalist. In 1984 the former members of the choir again began gathering in the Kyiv Hydropark and from 1985 in the Building of Culture “Kyivmetrobud”. In 1988 the choir once again took the name “Homin”. It was first in Kyiv to begin publicly singing the national anthem “Shche ne vmerla Ukraina” [“Ukraine’s glory has not perished”] and took part in large demonstrations and rallies in support of independence. The choir is a true living treasure of folk creativity in song. Leopold Yashchenko was awarded the State Taras Shevchenko Prize in 1993.

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