Every day as usually I firstly open my email to check on new messages. But on my surprise this morning I´ve got one mail from my Ukrainian friend who is now working in Shanghai at China Institute for Innovation. We met each other in Poland two years ago on Economic Forum of Young leaders. His letter is about some special facts about Ukraine, mostly about those things that we usually don´t think of these days… Of course that I will transfer his mail here, but that what he wrote also inspired me to search a bit more about something interesting and nice about Ukraine to broke this every day monotony of conflict and to show you another side of this country. Here is letter of my friend Sergii and 5 facts about his country, after letter I will put illustrations and add few more facts.
Dear Neven
Ukraine has been pretty much on the news recently.
When I meet a new person and on the question “Where are you from?”, I reply “Ukraine” the next comment is usually “Oh, your country in mess now”. Usually I say “It’s temporarily and will get better soon”. In country’s life as well as in person’s life are ups and downs. Challenging times makes us stronger. I believe that Ukraine will get better. Here I decided to share with you five unknown or not that well known facts about Ukraine (you might share it with your friends):
- Ukraine is the largest country whose territory is entirely located in Europe. Larger than Ukraine in Europe – only Russia, Turkey and Denmark. However, most part of Russia and Turkey are in Asia, and the Danish island of Greenland belongs to North America region.
- In a beauty contest of languages in Paris in 1934, the Ukrainian language is ranked third after French and Persian on such criteria as phonetics, vocabulary, phraseology and sentence structure and took the second place after the Italian language in terms of melodiousness.
- Ukraine has 1/4 of all stocks of black soil on the planet. Black soil with proper handling gives the greatest number of crops and considers as the best land for agriculture.
- Ukraine has developed the aircraft with the largest carrying capacity in the world – AN-225 “Mriya” (English name “Dream”). Originally it was designed to transport spacecrafts. The airplane “Dream” set 124 Guinnes records by taking on board 253 tons of cargo per flight in 2001.
- One of the world’s most famous Christmas songs – a “Shchedryk” ukrainian folk song was recorded by Ukrainian composer Mykola Leontovych. The world knows her as Carol of the Bells and Ring Christmas Bells.
Of course we do have lots of places with deep history, beautiful sea and mountains landscapes, delicious food, such as borsch and varenyky (dumplings with potato) and old style rich architecture. As one of the examples, you may check the cultural capital of Ukraine – Lviv city.
Thank you!
All the Best,
Sergii