O Jesus The Most Holy

I’ve been playing Polish hymns on Sunday morning for quite a while now, as preludes and Communion offerings. For the past several years I’ve been studying my heritage language and more recently, Polish history, right up to the late 19th century when my ancestors left the rural countryside and arrived in Buffalo, NY from Ellis Island with the assistance of a Roman Catholic priest from the WNY Diocese.

After Vladimir Putin amassed his Russian troops on Ukraine’s borders and gave orders to invade Poland’s sister Slavic country on February 24, 2022, I began following the New York Times coverage of the war daily. Somewhere along the way I began to add Ukrainian Cyrillic studies to my regular Polish language learning/sacred music research and discovered the two languages had a lot in common. I also found I could use my knowledge of Polish to help with decoding Ukrainian words after I had transliterated them into Western Latin characters.

After I got more comfortable with the basics of Ukrainian Cyrillic, I tried doing Google searches with it; specifically looking for hymns and sacred music that wasn’t turning up when I typed in English.

I discovered a wonderful Ukrainian website, with a vast collection of hymns, prayers and sacred music, all available for download and very playable on my harp!

cantices-rkc.org.ua Liturgical Chants – Roman Catholic Church

I’ve posted several here that I’ll be playing during Lent on my wire harps:

The Kingdom of Heaven is Near

Click on these two images to download a larger printable pdf and play them on your harp this Lent!