Orange you glad we had a revolution?

So, why was it called the Orange Revolution?

For those of you who don't closely follow Ukrainian politics, the Orange Revolution was a movement that began on the Ukrainian election day Sunday, November 21, 2004. This incredible movement arose in protest against disreputable campaign tactics and election freud by the administration of the "winner" of the election, President Victor Yanukovich. Many also protested Yanukovich's desire for closer ties with the Russian government and criticised him for being "In Putin's pocket".


The leader of this revolution was Victor Yuschenko (yes, another Victor ) who was also leader of the opposition. He favored closer ties with the west, getting Ukraine to be part of the UN and getting rid of the Russians once and for all.
The election day rally of many thousands of supporters grew in the following days to a rally of millions of people, who camped out in the streets of the Country's large cities and refused to leave until the election was declared freudulant and a new election was called. On Dec. 26, 2004 Ukrainians went back to the election booths, voting for Viktor Yushchenko and successfully voting him into office with the help of a lot of election monitering.

So why "Orange" revolution? Well, Victor Yuschenko's campaign colors were Orange. In Ukrainian Culture, orange is the traditional color of rejection. It came from a tradition in village life. When a young man (lets call him Slavko) approached a young lady (lets call her Marika) to ask her to marry him, she had 2 main options.
Option A: Marika could say yes! Now, would any self respecting Slavic woman just go ahead and make it easy for the manyand just say "yah, ok lets get married"? oh, no my friends. To say she approved of the match, (and bear in mind he would actually be asking her parents, and not her) She would scratch her fingernails against the walls of the clay-mud oven called a peech as an indication that she would like to marry him.
Now, if Marika was to choose Option B, she would reject poor Slavko. To do this properly, she would hand him a bright orange pumpkin. Sometimes she would need to think about the proposal for a few days, so she would then leave the pumpkin outside his door step.

yes, I'm not kidding.. Marika would give Slavko a pumpkin.

So, for Ukrainians, Orange is the color of rejection, and the Orange revolution rejected their political administration.