Oliynyk

The surname is a job description. Oliya is oil, and the oliynyk was the man who pressed it. The agent ending -yk fastened the trade to the man, and the name went into the registers beside the miller and the smith. Before the sunflower reached the country a Ukrainian press worked flax and hemp seed, and what came out of it was a household staple rather than a luxury.

What sets the oliynyk apart from the other trade names of the register is that his raw material changed under him. The press stayed more or less the same machine; the seed fed into it was replaced by a plant that had crossed the Atlantic, and that substitution ended with Ukraine as one of the two largest suppliers of the resulting oil on earth.

An oil mill is not a flour mill with a different sign over the door. Seed gives up nothing until it is bruised, and the tool for that was a pair of vertical millstones set on edge and walked around a central post, the arrangement known as edge runner stones, or a kollergang. The crushed mass was then stamped or squeezed under a press until the oil ran out of it, and what stayed behind came away as a solid cake.

Power came from whatever the site could offer. A treadmill would turn a small press; a windmill or a watermill drove a larger one, and steam arrived later and displaced all of them. Some watermills were built double, with wheat ground on one side of the watercourse and seed pressed on the other, which is as exact a picture as survives of how the two trades sat beside each other in one village. A wind-driven oil mill could put 100 to 200 tons of raw material through itself in a year.

The press cake, the flat solid remainder, was never a thing to be dumped. It went back out as food, as animal feed and as fertiliser, and the hulls stripped off the seed before pressing were fed to stock as well. Seed meal from a modern crush is valued for the same protein and fibre, and still goes to feed, fertiliser and fuel.

The oil had uses well past the kitchen. What was not fit to eat went into soap by saponification, into paints and varnishes, and into lamps. A settlement with a working press had cooking fat, light, grease and a wash of paint out of one crop, and that breadth is why the presser earned a name of his own rather than a line in the miller's ledger.

The reason a plant fat mattered so much in an Orthodox country is a rule of the church. Animal fats were not permitted during Lent, so butter and lard came off the table for the duration and only plant-based fats were allowed. That left every household needing something to cook with, and anyone who could press oil in a strong position for a substantial stretch of the year.

This is the mechanism by which sunflower oil took hold rather than merely arriving. Its use became very popular in Russia during the 18th century, and particularly popular with members of the Orthodox Church, because it satisfied the fasting rule where butter and lard did not. Ukrainians adopted it as their main source of cooking oil for that reason. It answered a question the kitchen was already asking every spring.

The sunflower is not a European plant. It was domesticated in the Americas, and in 1510 Spanish explorers who encountered it there carried its seeds back; the first crop breeds came from America to Europe during the 16th century. It was growing in an English herbal garden by 1597, where the botanist John Gerard raised it and refused to repeat the story that its heads follow the sun. Some, he wrote, "have reported it to turn with the Sun, the which I could never observe, although I have endeavored to find out the truth of it."

What changed everything was where the plant landed next. It was introduced to the Russian Empire, where the oilseed growers were, and there it was developed and grown at industrial scale rather than kept as an ornament. In the early 19th century a merchant named Daniil Bokaryov, in the village of Alexeyevka in Voronezh Governorate, worked out a method of extraction that suited large volumes, and it spread quickly from him. Alexeyevka has carried a sunflower on its coat of arms ever since.

In the field the plant is unmistakable: a rough-haired stem standing about three metres, a head between 7.5 and 12.5 centimetres across, the seeds packed in interlocking spirals. Gerard was right about the mature heads, which stop moving and hold an easterly line; it is the young buds that follow the sun and swing back overnight to meet it. Sown an inch deep and set some 45 centimetres apart, it is rotated with cereals, soybean or rapeseed.

It is not an easy crop to keep alive. Fusarium in the soil has taken as much as 80 per cent of a harvest, downy mildew gets in through the shallow planting the seed requires, and the parasitic broomrapes, which fasten on the roots, can take a whole field. The scale of the reward is why growers carry the risk. In 2024 the world produced 51.9 million tonnes of sunflower seed and Russia and Ukraine between them grew 58 per cent of it; of the 20.3 million tonnes of oil pressed in 2022, Russia supplied 30 per cent and Ukraine 23.

When kerosene ran short in Ukraine after the First World War, during the Russian Civil War, households burned sunflower seed oil in their lamps instead. Nobody pretended it was a good substitute; the light it gave has been described as miserable and smoky. It was light all the same, and it came out of a field the household already had.

The plant has since been put to stranger work. Sunflowers were planted at Chernobyl for bioremediation and set to draw caesium-137 and strontium-90 out of contaminated water by rhizofiltration. In June 1996, American, Russian and Ukrainian officials planted sunflowers together at the Pervomaysk missile base, where Soviet nuclear weapons had stood.

It is the national flower of Ukraine, and in 2022 it became more than that. A widely shared video showed a Ukrainian woman confronting a Russian soldier and telling him to "take these seeds and put them in your pockets so at least sunflowers will grow when you all lie down here", and the flower turned into a symbol of resistance far beyond the country's borders. The same invasion drove the global price of sunflower oil up by as much as 58 per cent inside a single month.

Denys Viktorovych Oliynyk was born in Zaporizhzhia on 16 June 1987 and joined Dynamo Kyiv in 2004, where he spent years appearing for Dynamo-3, Dynamo-2 and the reserve squad. He played twice for the senior side in the 2006-07 season but was not formally promoted to the main team until May 2008, under the incoming coach Yuri Semin, having already spent part of the 2007-08 season on loan at Naftovyk-Ukrnafta Okhtyrka.

A second loan made him. Sent to Arsenal Kyiv in July 2008 alongside Vitaliy Mandzyuk, he quickly became one of the leaders of that side's midfield and attack, and in the winter window Myron Markevych bought him for Metalist Kharkiv to strengthen the squad for the 2008-09 UEFA Cup, in which he played. Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk took him in July 2011; in May 2014 he signed a two-year contract with Vitesse of the Dutch Eredivisie, winning the Beloften Eredivisie in 2015, and Darmstadt 98 of the Bundesliga signed him in August 2016.

He came home to finish. In 2023 he joined the newly promoted LNZ Cherkasy, announced his retirement in January 2025, then signed for Avanhard Lozova that summer and took the Ukrainian Amateur Cup with them. He played for Ukraine at under-21 level and for the senior side. The game runs in the family: his father Viktor Oliynyk is a legendary player of Bukovyna Chernivtsi, and his godfather Valeriy Korolyanchuk is another.