Ostap Mykytovych Veresai (Ukrainian: Остап Микитович Вересай) (1803–April 1890) was a renowned minstrel and kobzar from the Poltava Governorate (now Chernihiv oblast) of the Russian Empire (now Ukraine).

[3] The painter visited the Galagan estate in Sokyryntsi, Ternopil Oblast, where Veresai was married and lived at the time.

At the meeting, which was attended by 28 members and 60 invited guests, the following papers were read: At this meeting, Veresai performed the dumas The Escape of the three brothers from Oziv from Turkish Captivity, About Fedir the one without kin (Fedor Bezrodny), the humorous song Shchyhol, and the dance melody Kozachok.

[5] It was covered by the London magazine Atheneum, which published both a summary of the conference[6] as well as an article by the folklorist and writer William Ralston Shedden-Ralston, which compared Veresai to the rhapsodes of ancient Greece.

[7] French conference delegate Alfred Rambaud also wrote of Veresai's performance in an article titled "Ukraine and its historic songs": One wonderful summer evening we gathered in the University garden to listen to the kobzar; he was seated on a stool, and the listeners, whose numbers continued to grow, sat down around him.

When Ostap performed one of his humorous songs, it is worth while looking at the way he would dance to the accompaniment of the music, while playing difficult notes on the bandura.

The villager Ostap Veresai is a direct descendant of the ancient Slavonic singers, he is the legal inheritor of the Boyan and other nightingales of the past...

There, he performed at meetings of the ethnographic sector and the painters' guild; at a breakfast organized in memory of Taras Shevchenko; and at the Winter Palace before Princes Sergey and Pavel Alexandrov.

Following his performances in Saint Petersburg, Eastern European composers such as Antonín Dvořák, Peter Tchaikovsky, Modest Mussorgsky, Leoš Janáček, Bohuslav Martinů, Mykola Lysenko, Vasyl Barvinsky, Mily Balakirev, Maria Zawadsky, Vladislav Zaremba, and Sylvia Zaremba wrote many dumky.

[4] Veresai's performances in Saint Petersburg may have influenced the creation of the Ems ukaz in 1876, which banned the use of the Ukrainian language in print.