Raleigh Ukrainian School Keeps Culture Alive

This story originally published online at NC Newsline.

Dozens of children, some dressed as angels, shepherds, and farm animals, stood flanked by twinkling blue and white lights as they sang Ukrainian Christmas carols at a Raleigh church recently.

Nearly four years ago, many of the children on stage were forced to flee their homes as Russian forces swept into Ukraine and drone strikes turned their neighborhoods to rubble. For some, it was their first opportunity to share in the cultural tradition of Vertep with other Ukrainian families since leaving home.

Held on Saint Nicholas Day, Dec. 6, Vertep marks the start of weeks of yuletide celebration in Ukraine. The performance is what Ukraine House founder Iryna Borodina describes as a “Ukrainian interpretation” of the nativity play, full of traditional folk songs and characters unique to the country. It’s the first time her organization has held the performance for Raleigh families.

Formed in the wake of the invasion, Ukraine House provides a Saturday school at Ridge Road Baptist Church in Raleigh where around 30 children learn Ukrainian art, history and language skills as well as activities like choir, guitar lessons, and ballet.

Parents say it is a crucial connection to the home their children were forced to leave behind. Some had lost much of their ability to read, write, and speak Ukrainian, more accustomed to English in day-to-day life. Others left at such an early age they never learned those skills in the first place.

“We left when [my daughter] was eight years old, so it was like second grade, and now she speaks English very well, more than Ukrainian,” said Yuliia Sytnyk, an art curator from Kherson who teaches at the Saturday school. “For kids, it seems like they get used to everything so fast, but of course it’s hard, all these changes.”

‘Each Person Tries to Give Something’

When Iryna Yermolaieva fled the war in Ukraine with her family, her oldest daughter had not yet started grade school. She did not know how to read and write in Ukrainian.

Traveling from place to place in Europe searching for refuge, there was no opportunity for her daughter to attend a Ukrainian school. It was only after coming to Raleigh that her child finally got the opportunity to become literate in her family’s language.

“We started attending classes in Ukrainian school, and in just a few months, she started reading Ukrainian,” Yermolaieva said. “She writes better than even me and my husband. Her handwriting is so perfect.”

Halyna Seredyuk, a longtime Ukrainian educator in the U.S. and overseas, was a big part of that journey. She has taught for 40 years, first as a high school teacher in Ukraine and then through Ukrainian Saturday schools abroad, including in Sweden and for roughly 20 years in Atlanta.

Seredyuk creates her own lesson plans, weaving in traditional Ukrainian proverbs such as Bdzhola mala, a y ta pratsyuye (“The bee is small, but it works too”). She brings back a big bag of handmade notebooks for the children every time she returns from a trip to Ukraine.

“They are reading, they are writing, they are talking,” Seredyuk said.

Though Yermolaieva’s daughter came to the school two months after classes began, Seredyuk worked one-on-one with her to get her up to speed. “She helped us so much,” Yermolaieva said.

Now, Yermolaieva volunteers her own time as a substitute teacher as many of the other parents do.“Each person tries to give something,” she said.

Yermolaieva said her daughters have made fast friends at the school. Her youngest, turning five years old this month, invited all of her classmates from the Ukrainian school to her birthday party.

“She just started [learning the] alphabet, a little bit of reading, art,” she said. “I hope everything will work out like with my oldest.”

At its core, she said, the school has provided an opportunity for her kids to experience their culture that she will be forever grateful for.

“I hope that this school will stay here for a long, long, long time and will help a lot of Ukrainian kids to know better their culture, language and history,” Yermolaieva said.

‘We Need to Build a New Life’

Sytnyk, the former curator who teaches art at the school, feels she has no home to return to. “I don’t miss my home because I know that around, everything is destroyed,” she said.

Kherson’s population has fallen from nearly 300,000 to roughly one-fifth of that, with much of the city laid to waste under Russian occupation. Even two years after its liberation by Ukrainian troops, the city faces hundreds of drone attacks every week.

“Nothing exists right now, and we cannot come back [to] our life,” Sytnyk said. “That’s why we need to build a new life, and how it will be, it’s only God knows.”

Since coming to the U.S., Sytnyk has worked to keep the arts of Ukraine alive through visual and musical exhibits and hands-on workshops with institutions like UNC-Chapel Hill, Carnegie Hall, and Yale.

One project she’s proudest of is a virtual tour of the vibrant home of Kherson artist Polina Raiko, its interior blanketed with painted representations of the artist’s grief. The home, a national cultural monument, was destroyed by floodwaters in 2023, after Russian soldiers destroyed a nearby dam.

She learned about the Saturday school program through Ukrainians in the Carolinas, a nonprofit that sprang up during the war to support the more than 2,000 refugees who have come to the state from Ukraine. As a teacher, she has brought her cultural expertise to the classroom.

Like Seredyuk, she has developed her own lesson plans for the classes at Ukraine House with the goal of connecting the children with their home country through its art. She also teaches a class for adults, open to Ukrainians as well as Americans who wish to better understand the country and its culture.

For a workshop on Petrykivka painting, a distinct floral pattern of painting originating from a village in Ukraine, she said some Ukrainian attendees came from as far as Wilmington.

“They said, ‘We don’t have anything about Ukraine, no events, nothing that we want to share with our kids,’” Sytnyk said.

“The parents want their kids to know about Ukraine and know their history, their culture, and it’s really important,” Sytnyk said. “Some people understood it only here when they’re so far from Ukraine.”

‘I Live for Two Countries’

Under Borodina’s watch, the Ukrainian school has grown from a single weekly language class in 2022 to a full-fledged Saturday school, with four classes a day for everyone from preschoolers to fifth and sixth graders.

Borodina sees her work not as building an enclave for Ukrainians in the Triangle, but as creating a bridge between two nations.

“This school is a part of our war to save and preserve our culture,” Borodina said. “We do not want to allow our culture to disappear even in the USA, because Russia, for example, in this war declared that we are not existing, and our culture is not existing culture.”

In her view, the war has forced Ukraine to become a “global nation.” She is in communication with Ukrainian schools from all around the world, from North Carolina to Germany, aimed at raising a generation of children fluent in the cultures of their native and adopted countries — future ambassadors in a world where Ukraine must work alongside countries across the globe to defend itself and rebuild.

“Right now, I live for two countries,” she said. “This is my mission.”

But she’s troubled by a year of sometimes hostile rhetoric by President Donald Trump toward Ukraine’s government and deep uncertainty over the future immigration status of Ukrainian refugees in the U.S.

Unlike some families who belong to Ukraine House, Borodina does not wish for her children to remain in the United States indefinitely.

“I would like my children to come back to Ukraine,” she said. “Actually, I would like other American children to come back to Ukraine, because they are our heritage.”

She said she had plans to found a secondary school for Ukrainians that could serve a similar purpose in North Carolina, but abandoned those plans after Trump made it clear he would take a hardline stance on refugees.

But the school she leads and the welcoming community within it will persist, she says.

“I believe this Saturday school will live even without me,” Borodina said. “We [Ukrainians] used to help each other ourselves, always, and this is our history.”

Comment on this story at [email protected].