Why is the Sunflower the National Flower of Ukraine?

Thanks to the director of our affiliated Ukraine office, Luba Rudenko, for inspiring us to share the story of Ukraine’s sunflowers.

Ukrainians have always loved flowers. Flowers fill the yards of village houses, and are woven into wreaths (venki) for girls to wear at celebrations. They’re embroidered on fabrics and painted on walls, wooden furniture, and household items in a folk art called petrykivka, added to UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Sunflower Love

Sunflowers (sunyashniki) are especially loved in Ukraine, where golden fields of them face the sunrise in the east. They are Ukraine’s national flower, and in folk imagery represent the warmth and power of the sun, which was worshipped by pre-Christian Slavs.

In a strange twist, the fact that Ukraine is one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of sunflower seeds and sunflower oil is partly due not to pagan practices, but to those of the Orthodox Church.

Sunflower Backstory

Sunflowers made their way to Ukraine through the efforts of the early explorers of North America, where it was one of only a few native food crops (along with squash, blueberries and pecans). Seeds were brought back to the old world, and found to grow well in hot, dry places with rich soil, such as the “Black Earth” regions of Ukraine.

The Orthodox Church comes into the story because during Lent, believers were not supposed to use butter or lard for cooking. Since sunflower oil was a fairly recent arrival, there were no specific restrictions on its use. Sunflower culture took off. By the 1800s, there were big fields of them all over Ukraine and western parts of Russia, and people were chewing the seeds and spitting out the shells.