A world awakener named Petka

You can see sometimes a lady who walks… a rooster in a small park next to Kyiv’s Golden Gate. Passers-by stop to take the photo of a couple that is so unusual for the urban landscape. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians have always considered the rooster a sacral, mythological, bird.

“Twice born, never baptized, and scares off the devil,” a folk saying has it. This bird in the courtyard is not only a precise alarm-clock and a time-tested “weatherman” but, first of all, a protector from evil spirits. The ancient Slavs associated the rooster with the sun and fire and called it Budymyr (awakener of the world). “Since times immemorial, the rooster and everything associated with it has had a positive connotation.

When a new house was built, a cat or a rooster was first let into it. This helped you spot ‘bad’ places and clean them up. When a rooster crows, the devilry vanishes,” ethnographer Natalia GROMOVA says. But today, the academic notes, it is difficult to say whether these traditions still survive in villages, for nobody has researched this. Besides, there are fewer and fewer roosters in the countryside.

The bird is gradually turning from a sacral symbol into a “soup set.” And while the Gallic rooster has occupied a firm place in the culture of France and Northern Italy, its Ukrainian counterpart is standing down. To prevent this, one should look more often at the birds embroidered on towels, take clay “whistler” roosters in your hands, and listen to “Roosters Singing” in the arrangement of Mykola Leontovych.