Forgotten Ancestors: A Journey to Western Ukraine

Another wonderful day full of surprises! We attended mass in a pretty little Ukrainian church in Lacko, home to my paternal grandmother, Agnieszka Cycyk (Cicik). As is common in the Soviet era, the town was renamed and is now called Solianuvatka, perhaps in tribute to the nearby salt mines.

The service was lovely. Greek Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox mass is completely sung by the priest and congregation who mostly stand or kneel. The interior was sparkling fresh, the pews decorated with embroidered banners on poles. Icons draped with long embroidered cloths complemented the colorfully stenciled walls. Above the altar hung little sparkling white Christmas lights. An icon-rich roodscreen separated the priest from the people while he prepared the sacrament. Maybe thirty men and women were attending mass in this small but intimate church.

The priest's sermon addressed the coming holiday known as Ivan Kupala Day-- a kind of summer solstice celebration harkening back to pagan fertility rites and one of the most expressive East Slavic folk holidays. The Orthodox Christian calendar has associated it with John the Baptist but it still contains pagan elements--like jumping over flaming bonfires and throwing flower garlands in the river. The priest cautioned the congregation not to get so caught up with the pagan rituals as to forget the Christian meaning. Unfortunately, we will be on the road on July 7th.

The older women took us on a tour of the cemetary where we looked for the names "Cycyk" and "Bobko", the maiden name of my great-grandmother. Searching through cemetaries is proving challenging. The grass is cut infrequently and was quite high, slippery and hid holes. I brought materials to make gravestone rubbings but the monuments were often of welded metal or shapes not easy to rub. Photos of the deceased are sometimes on the grave marker, either encased in glass on the older ones or etched on granite on newer tombstones. It was exciting to search for family look-alikes. The stones are inscribed in Cyrillic and would have been difficult to impossible to decipher without Slav's help.

Hubici, my grandfather's birthplace, was just down the road. Large nests were perched high on electric poles. Slav explained that they belonged to white storks, thought to be sacred birds bringing good luck to the families they grace with their nests. These are never disturbed and sometimes the storks come back year after year, building higher and higher.

Hubici is bigger than I expected--about 200 homes. It's also smaller than I anticipated, since these homes are very squeezed together, separated by narrow dirt paths. While waiting for the church service to end, we searched the cemetary for the name "Wojtowicz". This has been Americanized to "Voytovich." We found many such graves close to the church, a position which supposedly signifies respect for the deceased. (I found out later that my great-grandmother Eva is buried near the church's foundation.)

About five years ago I corresponded online with a very kind man from Canada who was familiar with this area and visited often. I paid him a modest amount to take some pictures of a land that I never dreamed I'd see with my own eyes. By chance, he photographed a child, her grandmother and great-grandmother. The oldest woman, Anna, was a Wojtowicz by marriage. I was touched by the picture and sent her a letter in Ukrainian asking if we were related. I never received a reply but often thought of the three of them as I planned this journey.

So as the congregation emerged, I kept searching for Anna, hoping she might still be alive. Suddenly a woman approached me and asked if I had once sent a letter. She was the woman in the photo, Anna's daughter, and a Wojtowicz by birth! I was saddened to learn that Anna, in her nineties, had died a few years ago. Yaraslava then graciously invited us into her home. It seems that she had replied to my request for information but I never received it.

It was interesting to see the inside of one of these small, square cottages. This one is extremely tidy and pleasing to the eye. There are four multifunctional rooms, all furnished with beds piled with pillows to be used as couches during the day and a small round table with chairs. Several generations live in this compact home and each manages to carve out a personal space. The walls are covered with colorful tapestries. Family photos and icons are draped with rushnyki, the long, embroidered ritual cloths popular with Ukrainians. There is no indoor plumbing or gas heat but a well and an outhouse are just outside and each room is heated with a wood-burning tile stove. Life will be so much easier when the gas line eventually comes to town. A summer kitchen, with a wood stove, stood adjacent to the main house and this was where, without any notice, Yaraslava graciously prepared lunch for us. She served many small dishes full of tasty goodies, including a terrific cake made by her daughter, the town's most noted cook. We toasted with vodka and got to know each other, thanks to Slav's unobtrusive translating. The highlight of the meal was a large, steaming plate of homemade periogies!

Yaraslava discovered that Grandpop had a younger brother named Marco who had 4 sons and 2 daughters. This was very surprising to me since my grandfather never spoke of him. Shortly before this trip, however, I found the WWI draft record of my grandmother Cicik's brother and for the first time learned of the town of Lacko. Yaraslava's independant research showed that Marco had an older brother, Wasyl, who left for America and there married a girl from Lacko. So it sounds as if this could be my grandfather!

Yaraslava's grandson took us to see a 550 year old wooden Boyko church proportedly a 20 minute stroll away. I'm starting to understand that Ukrainians walk much faster than I do! It took us about an hour of forging small rivers, wading barefoot through others, climbing beautiful, verdant landscape and eating startlingly good wild berries to arrive at a secluded spot deep in the woods. There stood a church that my people have been attending since the 1500's. We had obtained the key from the village priest and went inside to see some very old and lovely wood carvings. Tradition has it that a shepard fell asleep and lost his cows. He prayed that he would find them. A vision told him that indeed they would be found and he must, in gratitude, build a church on that spot--which he did. It is called, appropriately, The Church of the Shepard and is still used once a year by the locals for a special service attended by crowds of people. Nearby was a little chapel built on the spot where villagers said they saw the Virgin Mary and where a spring miraculously flowed out of the ground.

We headed back to town close to one of the remaining border posts surviving from the Soviet era. Slav said Ukraine is the last closed door to the West, and many Afghans, etc. try to cross over to Poland where they can go anywhere undetected. So the border is not to keep Ukrainians and Poles apart but to regulate the comings and goings of other nationalities. It makes life difficult for everyone, however. The wait to cross the border can be 12 hours but wait they do because Ukrainians are able to make a living buying things on the Polish side and selling them at a profit back home--and the same is true for the Poles. Life will be easier and property values will climb when eventually in the unknown future this border crossing becomes defunct.

This wooden church is also a special pilgrimage site for the people in nearby Poland but, for decades, the fence has shut off easy access. It is the last Station of the Cross for those seekers willing to navigate the complicated political waters.

When we got back, Yaraslava's daughter had prepared another great meal. We spent a long time talking about Ukrainian traditions and also about our lives. They verified my childhood memory of being at Grandmom's house on Ukrainian Christmas Eve and throwing honey and barley on the ceiling to bring good luck. No one else in my family remembers this. I also recalled the hay under the tablecloth and table to symbolize the manger and feeding the animals on Christmas Eve-- a night when they are suppose to talk. These people do all of this (they make special donuts for the animals) and my grandparents sought to keep the traditions alive.

Yaraslava told us that when she was young, Soviets forced her family along with 6 others, all leaders in Hubici, to board cattle cars bound for Siberia. She spent 7 years there under odious conditions. When she returned, her family home had been given to resettled Ukrainians from Poland. It took them 10 years to buy another place. She looked very sad describing these difficult years that had robbed her of a childhood.

She then took us for a tour of the farm. The villagers live in very close proximity to each other in small compounds which are surprisingly compact but their fields are a distance away. Each day, a different famiy is responsible for taking the village herd of cows out to pasture. Everything is very orderly. One of the buildings contains 3 cows, a pig, chickens and geese. This building is only a few steps from the house but did not seem unsanitary. Rabbits are raised for meat. Many households keep bees for the honey and wax. They have their personal garden here and many fruit and nut trees. All of this produce will be canned or dried for use in winter. They make their own cheese and sausage, also. Forages into the woods for berries and mushrooms supplement what they raise. Yaraslava's son-in-law, holding a jar of fabulous wild raspberries, said it was an enviromentally correct existence--that they used absolutely no chemicals. So basically the community stays close together for support and companionship but travels quite a bit to farm the land. It is a hard life, though not a bad one at all. The pace is slow and steady and each day is spent in meaningful work.

In the evening, we went to visit Yaraslava's Aunt Stefania, widow of Marco's son, Stefan. We hoped she would remember either Marco or my Great-Grandmother Eva but she's very old and wanted to talk about her own life and travels. We had alot of fun singing songs with her. Stefania is a poignant example of an intelligent woman whose life would have been much different had she been educated. Her grandson, perhaps a cousin of mine, took us back to the cemetary to see the graves of Marco's sons Vasil, Ivan and Stefan.

I found the place where Grandpop was probably born but it has been converted into a Roman Catholic church. All in all, it was quite a day!!

Photos: top: Grandpop's home, now a church; next: 550 year old Boyko church; next: Yaraslava and her cows; next: Yaraslava's compound; next: impromtu songfest; bottom: Yaraslava's sun room

posted by Sandy @ 11:36 PM