In Southern Brazil, a Ukrainian Community Flourishes

Ukraine has had a tumultuous history and has featured prominently in many of Europe’s major events over the past few centuries, including both World Wars. With each upheaval came waves of Ukrainian migration to other continents, as people sought economic opportunities while others fled war and political repression. Many went to North America, where Canada and the United States developed established Ukrainian diasporas. But Ukrainians also migrated to South America, including Argentina and Brazil. The strongest concentration is in Prudentópolis, a municipality of roughly 50,000 people sometimes called “Little Ukraine.” More than three-quarters of its residents speak at least some Ukrainian, according to Anderson Prado, a historian at the Federal University of Paraná who has studied the community.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. Ukrainian is taught in public schools in some parts of the Paraná region. There are over 100 Greek Catholic parish centers in Prudentópolis. Brazil is home to 600,000 people of Ukrainian descent, with roughly 80 percent living in Paraná. Many are descended from immigrants who arrived more than a century ago, creating one of the largest Ukrainian communities outside of eastern Europe. The Church of Our Lady of Patronage in Prudentópolis. (Photo: Facebook page of Igreja Nossa Senhora do Patrocínio – Linha Esperança.) Other Topics of Interest A Kyivan Elegy – Babyn Yar A prose-poem commemorating 85 years since the Nazi massacre at the Babyn Yar ravine in Kyiv. A community takes root The first organized group of Ukrainian immigrants arrived in Paraná in 1891. Roughly 1,500 families settled around Prudentópolis in the 1890s, many coming from villages around present-day Ternopil in western Ukraine, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Ukrainian outlet RBC-Ukraine wrote: “People from Galicia, Ternopil, and Ivano-Frankivsk regions sought a better life and migrated to South America. The Brazilian government offered land for settlement, so thousands of Ukrainian families settled here.” Cláudia Serathiuk’s family was among those early immigrants. Her paternal ancestors, Simão and Eufrosina Serotiuk, arrived from Vertelka, in the Ternopil region, in 1895 with nine children. They initially settled in a forested area near the Serra do Mar, where Simão died. Eufrosina continued inland with her children and eventually settled in Prudentópolis. Serathiuk, who was born and lives in Curitiba, traces all sides of her family to Ukrainian immigrants. “All my ancestors are Ukrainian,” she said. “Most Ukrainian émigrés were peasants who came there in the late 19th and early 20th century, or their descendants,” said Nataliia Rudnytska, a scholar at Volodymyr Dahl East Ukrainian National University who has studied Brazil’s Ukrainian diaspora. Unlike Ukrainian communities in the United States, Canada and West Germany, “where many Ukrainians who were opposed to the Soviet regime decided to stay after World War II,” she said, many of those who came to Brazil were seeking economic opportunity. According to research from the Lviv University of Business and Law, Ukrainian migration to Brazil occurred in several distinct waves: between 1872-1914, 1917-39, and 1947-51. Unlike Ukrainian communities in North America, however, Brazil’s diaspora received relatively little new immigration in the decades that followed. Augusto Harmatiuk, a Ukrainian-Brazilian who lives in Curitiba and whose ancestors arrived from Halychyna [Galicia] between 1896 and 1909, describes it as an “ancient diaspora.” “We were not ‘renewed,’” Harmatiuk said. “We are largely the descendants of immigrants who self-identified as ‘Ruthenians,’” which the Encyclopedia of Ukraine notes as “a historical name for Ukrainians corresponding to the Ukrainian.” It was historically associated with Ukrainians who lived in western Ukraine under the Habsburg monarchy. Harmatiuk added, “There are language classes, pysanka classes, bandura classes, and dance classes. There are those who write, those who translate books, those who make movies, those who embroider, those who do crafts, those who play instruments, those who sing.” The earliest communities were largely agricultural, but the immigrants quickly built institutions that helped preserve their identity. Historian Serge Cipko, citing an account of Ukrainian settlements from 1922 by Petro Karmansky, notes that the Prudentópolis area had 23 schools run by the Basilian Fathers, nine Ukrainian churches and chapels, and 10 branches of the secular organization Soyuz. By 1920, Ukrainians may have represented roughly 5 to 6 percent of Paraná’s population. Later waves brought political refugees and members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, adding to communities that had initially been dominated by farmers. In 1934, Ukrainians established the Ukrainian Union in Brazil, which became another center of cultural life. Ukrainian Greek Catholic and Orthodox churches were also important, serving as centers for both worship and community life. In January 2025, a new Ukrainian Greek Catholic church dedicated to St. Nicholas was consecrated in Joinville, in neighboring Santa Catarina, after years of work by the local Ukrainian community. Demonstration against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at Ukraine Square in Curitiba, 2025. (Photo: Augusto Harmatiuk) Keeping a culture alive The communities’ relative isolation helped preserve those traditions. Many of the early immigrants settled in rural areas, where generations of families lived alongside other Ukrainians. Researchers John Lehr and Serge Cipko found that aspects of traditional Ukrainian culture survived longer in Brazil than among Ukrainian communities in Canada, even though many of the immigrants came from the same areas of western Ukraine. Ukrainian-Canadian historian Orest Subtelny described the settlements as the closest surviving approximation of a 19th-century Galician village. The Ukrainian spoken around Prudentópolis developed differently from the language spoken in Ukraine. This is because generations were separated from their ancestral homeland, meaning residents preserved older forms of Ukrainian brought by immigrants in the late 19th century, even as the language in Ukraine continued to develop. Many are now fifth-generation Brazilians who have never visited Ukraine but continue to speak the language. Serathiuk grew up speaking both Ukrainian and Portuguese and was baptized in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. She lived with her grandparents for decades, while the family continued many of the traditions brought from Ukraine. “My great-grandmother Teodosia Petryk lived in Brazil for 52 years without ever speaking a word of Portuguese,” Serathiuk said. “She never needed to, because in her family, in the neighborhood, at the market and at church, everyone spoke Ukrainian.” Brazilian filmmaker Guto Pasko is another example. A fifth-generation descendant of Ukrainian immigrants who grew up near Prudentópolis, Pasko reportedly spoke only Ukrainian until he was 11. He later directed several documentaries about the Ukrainian community in Brazil, including “Made in Ucrania: Os Ucranianos no Paraná.” But maintaining the language has become more difficult with each generation. Harmatiuk said Ukrainian is becoming less common among descendants, even as community groups offer language classes, including online. “Maintaining the language among young people is a constant challenge,” he said, particularly for a small community surrounded by Portuguese speakers. In 2021, Prudentópolis made Ukrainian its second official language, more than 125 years after the first large Ukrainian settlements were established there. The neighboring municipality of Mallet followed in 2022. In Curitiba, Paraná’s capital, the Ukrainian Society of Brazil operates the Lesia Ukrainka Ukrainian Saturday School alongside Ukrainian dance and choir ensembles. Ukrainian-Brazilian writer and translator Vira Selianska, better known as Vira Vovk, became central to that effort. In 1959, she helped publish an anthology introducing Brazilian readers to Ukrainian literature spanning centuries. According to Rudnytska, nearly all literary translations from and into Ukrainian produced by the community were made either by Selianska or with her participation, including dozens of journals and more than 40 books. “It is really the case when one person’s dedication and commitment brings real changes,” Rudnytska said. The community has pushed for recognition of Ukrainian history as well. Paraná recognized the Holodomor, the Soviet-engineered famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933, as genocide in 2007. Curitiba and Prudentópolis followed in 2008, Maringá in 2019 and Roncador in 2021. Roncador’s city council pointed to the Ukrainian roots of local families and the continued preservation of their culture when adopting the measure. Members of the Grupo Folclórico Ucraniano Poltava, which is a traditional Ukrainian folk group based in Curitiba, Brazil, founded in 1981. (Photo: Facebook of Grupo Folclórico Ucraniano Poltava) The war renews old ties Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine has helped revitalize historical ties. In May 2024, a delegation from the Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations traveled to Brazil, meeting Presbyterian, Baptist, Adventist and Pentecostal leaders in São Paulo before continuing to Curitiba. The delegation’s mission was to raise awareness about Russia’s invasion and encourage Brazilian churches to support Ukraine. According to researcher Nataliya Shevchenko of the Foreign Policy Council “Ukrainian Prism,” lawmakers from Paraná make up a noticeable share of the Brazilian congressional friendship groups with Ukraine. Before President Jair Bolsonaro traveled to Moscow just days before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, the Ukrainian diaspora appealed to him to support Ukraine and visit Kyiv. However, that influence has not always translated into support from Brasília. Brazil recognized Ukrainian independence in December 1991, and the two countries later developed a strategic partnership. But relations cooled following Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014. Brazil abstained from a United Nations resolution affirming Ukraine’s territorial integrity, creating a divide between a Ukrainian community with strong cultural ties to its ancestral homeland and a national government reluctant to oppose Russia. The Brazilian diaspora’s relationship with Ukraine itself has not always been as strong. Ola Hnatiuk, a professor at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy who has researched the role of the Ukrainian diaspora in advancing Ukraine’s interests abroad, said diaspora communities have built extensive ties with one another, with Ukrainian Americans providing substantial support to the community in Brazil. But she said the Ukrainian government could have done more to engage those communities. “Ukraine as a state should have done much more to support the diaspora,” Hnatiuk said. While the war has made that more difficult, she added, money is not necessarily the most important part. “The financial dimension is not crucial, the symbolic dimension is much more vital.” Similar communities took root elsewhere in South America. Argentina also became home to a sizable Ukrainian diaspora beginning in the late 19th century. Many of the first immigrants were peasants from Galicia who settled in the northern province of Misiones, where they established farming communities and churches. Later waves brought Ukrainians fleeing political repression and war. “In Argentina alone, before Russia’s invasion, there was a Ukrainian diaspora of over 400,000 people, one of the largest in both Americas,” Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, said in 2024. Chile developed a much smaller community. Its first significant wave arrived after World War II, when roughly 300 Ukrainian refugees came from displaced-person camps in Europe in 1948 and 1949. However, the degree to which Ukrainian culture survived in southern Brazil is unusual. Russia’s full-scale invasion brought some descendants closer to Ukraine. “We have become much more patriotic as we connect with the stories of wars, famines and invasions that our ancestors suffered,” Serathiuk said. “The ideal of a free and sovereign Ukraine remains.” Harmatiuk has noticed another change. He said more descendants are researching their family histories, learning about Ukraine and taking a greater interest in their ancestry. “I see more descendants interested in their ancestry than I realized a decade ago,” he said, adding that a longing for the ancestral land “has been rekindled.” For some Brazilian Ukrainians, the war has made that relationship more direct. Father Makariy, an Orthodox priest who grew up in Brazil’s Ukrainian community, traveled to Ukraine and became a chaplain with the 2nd International Legion of Defense of Ukraine. Today, a piece of Galicia remains somewhat frozen in time in southern Brazil. In some places, it can feel like Ukraine itself, only from another era. The traditions run deep, even as familiarity with the homeland has faded over generations. “Being Ukrainian is part of my life,” Serathiuk added. “It is important for our community because it keeps our history and the history of Ukraine alive.”