Local lore collection
Ukrainian wedding : (with voices) / recorded [preface and commentary] by Iv. Demchenko ; art. 3rd ed. – Odesa : Publishing house of Y. I. Fesenko. Published by Y. I. Fesenko, [1908]. 127 p. : ill., music notes.
“Ukrainian Wedding (with Voices)” is the third edition of a unique ethnographic collection, the materials for which were recorded in 1896-1900 in the town of Monastyryshche, Lipovets county, Kyiv province, and prepared for publication in 1903 by Ukrainian ethnographer, folklorist, and physician Ivan Demchenko (1856 ?). The publication contains 277 wedding songs with music notes, recorded without changes from the words and voices of local peasants, in the authentic sequence and melody. Each number of the collection corresponds to the actual order of the songs during a traditional Ukrainian wedding. The collection's peculiarity is its completeness and authenticity, which gives it a high ethnographic value. The illustrations for the book were created by the outstanding Ukrainian artist Ambrosiy Zhdakha.
The collection, the first edition of which was published in 1905, went through two reprints in 1908 and became an important source for studying wedding ceremonies in the Kyiv region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Under the title “Wedding in the Town of Monastyryshche, Lipovets County, Kyiv Province”, this work was also published in the first book of the two-volume collection “Wedding” (Kyiv, 1970).