Klaipėdos universitetas

The traditional rites of the last week before the beginning of Lent were well known in various ethnographic regions of Ukraine until the middle of the 20th century. The most archaic are the traditional rites, the actions of which are related to the being of the mythical Kolodiy (Колодíй): his “birth”, “baptism”, “funeral”, thus testifying to the summarized life cycle. All this was played out every day during the entire week: married women tied wooden sticks («колóдки») to the bodies of guys and girls who had not been married for too long, they all together destroyed the jackstraw of Kostrub (Кóструб), men’s physical competitions (fisticuffs) were held, known since Kyivan Rus’ times. Here, the tradition of feasting on flour and sour milk dishes was directly related to the cult of the Heavenly Lights and promoted a faster disappearance of the winter manifestations in nature. All the mentioned rites were accompanied by special songs dedicated to them.

ge group of professional scientists and local ethno-culture preservation enthusiasts. The collected audio and video material is transferred to the most famous folklore archives in Kyiv, Lviv and Dnipro, and to regional cultural heritage protection institutions. It is a time-consuming process which is not always carried out systematically and consistently. In February 2022, the hostilities launched by the Russo-fascists in Ukraine fundamentally changed the specifics of this work. In these difficult conditions, it is necessary to look for opportunities urgently to transfer the mentioned recordings of ethnographic material, or copies of them, for storage in similar secure foreign archives. The article provides information about the author’s personal recordings of Ukrainian folklore, their scope, preservation possibilities, and the prospects for their documentation and research in Vilnius, in the archive of the Department of Folklore of the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore.