Ukrainian musician and journalist Marichka shares songs for kidnapped children and stories of being a medic on the war front

 

Marichka is a Ukrainian-Canadian singer and human rights advocate, winner of the Amnesty International Prize and creator of the folk music website, https://folk-ukraine.com. She is the former lead singer with Balaklava Blues and Lemon Bucket Orkestra. She has performed at top venues around the world including Carnegie Hall in New York, The Barbican Centre in London and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

In 2023 Marichka joined Ukrainian Army Forces as a volunteer combat medic and an embedded journalist in the Donbás region in Eastern Ukraine.

Her latest project is producing, composing and singing on the music/human rights album, Daughters of Donbas – Songs of Stolen Children. The album deals with the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children that have been abducted from occupied regions in Eastern Ukraine and taken to Russia. The song 4.5.0 from that album (an excerpt is heard during the interview) is in the words of a mother singing to her far-away daughter, reassuring her that everything will someday be alright. 4.5.0 is a code used by the Ukrainian army to indicate that all is well.

Marichka’s teaching and singing repertoire is over 500 years old and was collected over the past 20 years on various ethnographic field expeditions to Ukrainian villages by the renowned folk ensemble Bozhychi, of which she was a founding member.