Vertep (Folk Puppet Drama)

The vertep is a Ukrainian folk puppet theater on Christmas themes that arose in the 17th–18th centuries among wandering clerics and students of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. The vertep box had two tiers: on the upper one a religious drama about the birth of Christ, King Herod, and the massacre of the infants was played; on the lower one, a secular, comedic part with folk types (the Zaporozhian Cossack, the Old Man and Old Woman, the Gypsy, the soldier, the priest). The vertep combined the sacred and the comic, book drama and the folk element. Vertep texts were studied by Ivan Franko, Mykola Petrov, and Yosyp Fedas. The vertep tradition, interrupted in Soviet times, has been actively revived since the 1990s. Vertep dramaturgy influenced the formation of Ukrainian drama — from interludes to the theater of Les Kurbas.