Marriage and family in the Ukrainian Cultural Tradition as a space of moral responsibility, religious blessing, and national identity preservation

Abstract

The article examines the phenomenon of marriage and family in the Ukrainian cultural tradition through the lens of three interrelated and mutually conditioning dimensions: moral-ethical, religious-sacral, and national-identificational. It is argued that these dimensions do not exist in isolation but form an integral spiritual-axiological space within which the Ukrainian family fulfilled its sociocultural function across generations.  In the moral-ethical aspect, the article explores traditional conceptions of marriage as a union that carries responsibility before the kin group and the community, grounded in voluntary consent, fidelity, and mutual care. It is demonstrated that the moral responsibility of spouses in folk consciousness extended beyond the two partners to encompass children, parents, and the entire family community. Special attention is paid to the educational role of pre-marital rituals – matchmaking, betrothal, and the maiden evening – in shaping a morally mature individual prepared to assume the obligations of the marital bond.  The religious-sacral dimension of the article is devoted to the role of the Orthodox and Greek Catholic sacrament of matrimony in forming the spiritual foundations of conjugal life. It is established that ecclesiastical blessing was perceived as a necessary condition for the legitimacy of marriage, while the wedding rite itself was enriched with folk symbolic content – crowns, embroidered towels, and the circling of the altar. The study examines the synthesis of the ecclesiastical and the folkloric, which is a characteristic feature of Ukrainian religious culture.  The third section analyzes wedding ceremonialism as a mechanism for the preservation and transmission of national identity. The symbolic potential of key ritual elements – the rushnyk (embroidered towel), the kalyna (guelder rose), the korovai (ritual bread), and wedding songs – is explored in terms of their role in reproducing the cultural codes of the Ukrainian people. It is shown that the regional diversity of wedding traditions, combined with a shared symbolic core, reflects the unity-in-diversity of Ukrainian culture.  The article concludes that the revitalization of traditional values of marriage and family constitutes an important condition for the preservation of national identity in the face of contemporary globalization pressures and the challenges of armed conflict.