Laments (keening) are improvised ritual wailing-songs with which the Ukrainian tradition mourned the dead. This is one of the most ancient genres of folk creativity, its roots reaching back to pre-Christian, pagan beliefs about the passage of the soul to the other world.
Laments were performed mainly by women — relatives of the deceased or specially invited holosilnytsi (keeners). Their delivery, on the border between song and weeping, was built on free improvisation, fixed poetic formulas, and rhetorical appeals to the departed. The melody of a lament is descending, with characteristic “sobs” and broken phrases that convey the very nature of grief. This archaic genre was studied by leading Ukrainian ethnographers; it preserved unique features of ancient intonational thinking that have almost vanished in other European cultures.
