In honor of the World Embroidery Day, which will be celebrated this year on Thursday, May 15, the World Congress of Ukrainians (WCU) is calling on Ukrainians and friends of Ukraine worldwide to join marches and wear embroidered shirts.

Embroidery Day, May 15: WCU urges Ukrainians around the world to support Ukraine

The central goal of this global campaign is to publicly support the territorial integrity of Ukraine, with particular attention to temporarily occupied territories.

During the planned marches, the WCU suggests dedicating special attention to the territories temporarily occupied by Russia. The organization calls on Ukrainians worldwide to wear embroidered shirts in solidarity with those who cannot do so due to the threat of persecution – residents of Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhia, and Kharkiv regions.

In its address, the World Congress of Ukrainians reminds us that the Russian Empire has been trying for decades to destroy everything Ukrainian: language, culture, traditions. However, even in exile and deportation, Ukrainians continued to embroider, and these patterns became a language of resistance and resilience.

On World Embroidery Day, the WCU aims to remind the global community once again about the temporarily occupied Ukrainian lands, their unique cultural heritage, and to support those Ukrainians who cannot openly demonstrate their national identity due to the threat of punishment from the occupying authorities.

The campaign will be held under the slogan #EmbroideryForever: the occupation is temporary, the embroidery is forever.

The World Congress of Ukrainians also calls on all concerned individuals to publish photos on social media of embroidery patterns that are characteristic of the occupied regions of Ukraine and to add the slogan “I wear embroidery for…” – mentioning a specific region or a person's name.