Leontovych lived in Pokrovsk during the first years of the 20th century, and it was there he began to make a name for himself as a composer while teaching music and running a local choir.

And it was around that time that he repurposed a local folk tune to write Carol of the Bells — then called Shchedryk — and after World War I it became the anthem of Ukrainian nationalists hoping to gain independence from Russia, which had controlled the country’s people for centuries. //

“Shchedryk, which was a hit and always played as an encore, enchanted Europe and America, and helped Ukrainians to declare their nation and state to the world,” said author Anatoliy Paladiychuk.

But Leontovych paid dearly for his defiance of the Russian yoke.

After the Bolsheviks retook swaths of Ukraine during the Russian Civil War, he was tracked down by Soviet agents and murdered in a 1921 assassination that was covered up until the 1990s.