Name: Natalya Mazharova
Age: 26
Education: legal education at National University Odesa Law Academy, Odesa I. I. Mechnikov National University, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv
Profession: CEO of Vyshyvanka Festival in Odesa
Did you know? Mazharova opened Odesa’s first store of vyshyvankas in 2016.
When in 2009 Natalya Mazharova organized the first Vyshyvanka Festival in Odesa, some 5,000 people joined the one-day handicraft fair and march of people wearing traditional Ukrainian embroidered shirts. Nine years later, 120,000 people attended the five-day Vyshyvanka Festival in 2017.
The numbers show that Mazharova’s main goal — to debunk stereotypes that Odesa, a city of 1 million located 500 kilometers south of Kyiv, is not “very Ukrainian” and its residents aren’t “really patriotic” — is being achieved.
Another goal, Mazharova says, appeared after Russia unleashed its war against Ukraine in the Donbas: “We now more promote the idea that Ukrainians are successful, modern and cool, showing modern Ukrainian culture.”
“We want to raise healthy patriotism. It’s not about the past, but it’s for building a modern state now,” Mazharova told the Kyiv Post. “You won’t see sharovary (cossack trousers) or old traditional jugs at our festival. They are a taboo.”
The main symbol is vyshyvanka, the wearing of which is supposed to help people see themselves as citizens of Ukraine.
“The festival is about Ukrainians, who are not lazy, who want and can change something, … and create something,” she said.
Local businesses, “who want Odesa to be Ukrainian,” support the Vyshyvanka Festival each year. Some invest money, some donate their products. One of the local bakeries treat the festival’s volunteers and participants with buns and bread. Local authorities have also started to help — this year for the first time the festival received support from both city and oblast administrations. City authorities provided a stage, while the governor’s office gave money for star participants’ payments.
Mazharova said they don’t have specific plans for the 10th festival in 2018, but noted that they change at least one third of a program each year, focusing on whatever is of current interest.
“If there is Ukrainian fashion, we show fashion, if there’s an interest towards Ukrainian-produced drones, we will show drones,” she said.
Aside from coordinating the Vyshyvanka Festival, Mazharova and her team advise the organizers of smaller festivals in Odesa, as well as Ukrainian diasporas abroad, helping them to organize cultural events.
“Some of them still wear sharovary, eat varenyky and think this is what Ukraine is about,” she said. “But we want to show more, so that people abroad don’t think that Ukraine is a museum of old traditions. We bring new formats, modern culture, showing that we are much broader than that.”
