About Olha Franko

Olha Franko — 1896–1987

Olha Franko was born on 24 July 1896 in Viriv, Galicia. She lived for 91 years, through two world wars, displacement, and the upheavals of a century — never losing sight of what mattered most to her: feeding people, passing things on, keeping something alive.

In the early 1920s she lived in Vienna, where she completed a two-year programme in culinary arts at the College of Agriculture. It was there that her vision took shape: a Ukrainian cuisine rooted in Galician tradition but open to the wider world. She married Petro Franko — engineer, co-founder of the Plast scouting movement, pioneer of Ukrainian aviation, and son of Ivan Franko, the poet and activist who stands as one of the great figures of Ukrainian literature and national identity. It was Petro who wrote the preface to her book.

In 1929, she published in Kolomyia Percha ukraïnska zahalno-praktychna kukhnia — The First Ukrainian General Practical Kitchen — a 488-page illustrated volume that stands as a founding work of Ukrainian culinary writing. In 1937 she followed it with Vsenarodnia kukhnia (National Cuisine), a book concerned with nutrition and food quality, in which she called on housewives to demand proper food inspections from local authorities.

Her work was reprinted in 1991, and again in 2019.

This site grew from another kind of transmission: that of her granddaughter, who grew up hovering in her kitchen, quietly stealing dried fruit from under her hands, watching dough become something extraordinary. Olha's recipes have moved through generations — from grandmother to mother, from mother to children, from children to grandchildren. They arrive here in a new form: more detailed, more accessible, but still alive. Still hers.