Culture, in particular folk culture, preserves our distinct cultural heritages that were passed down from generation to generation. They can be found in our dialects, folklore, handicrafts, customs, cuisine. These are our voices, tastes, smells, experiences, sounds from the past, our intangible, nonmaterial connections to the past, to our predecessors.
Recently, Gazeta.ua published an article (in Ukrainian) about soccer in interwar Galicia, and it includes a list of soccer terms used in Galicia in that period. In the diaspora we still call soccer (football) копаний м’яч (literally, “kicked ball”), the term that was used in pre-WWII Galicia. Today in Ukraine, […]
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Olena Kulchytska was a Galician Modernist, legendary Lvivian, famous artist, and skilled teacher. She is my favorite Ukrainian artist; in particular, I like how she combines Secession and Ukrainian folk art. Furthermore, she lived about 5 minutes away from where I live in Lviv, and in the interwar period in […]
“If the real Jewish music of Transylvania is gone, this disc makes sure it will not be forgotten.” – See more here.
My paternal grandfather was born in the village of Lybokhora (Turka District), the “capital” of Boyko instrumental music. His parents, who were from the Sambir and Lviv regions, moved to this Carpathian village in the early 1900s to direct and teach at the local school. This is a picture from […]
“Z wysokiego pola” (From the High Field) is one of my favorite songs by Orkiestra św. Mikołaja. The melody of the song is Hungarian, while the text is a Polish ballad from the region near Zamość— an ancestral land. In the early nineteenth century my great 4x grandfather had an estate in Zalesie. […]
I bought my tsymbaly (hammered dulcimer) from the Tafiychuks—a family of musicians and instrument makers that lives in the Carpathian Mountains. Mykhailo Tafiychuk, or “the Last Hutsul Musical Magician” as Cobblestone Freeway dubbed him in this article, makes many different ancient instruments such as the hurdy gurdy, tsymbaly, and duda (Ukrainian bagpipe). […]
A documentary film was recently released about the dying tradition of shepherding in the Carpathian Mountains. The film, called The Living Fire (Жива Ватра), was directed by my acquaintance Ostap Kostyuk. “ЖИВА ВАТРА” (The Living Fire) Ukraine, 2014, 77’ “A four-year-long project documenting three generations of Ukrainian Carpathian shepherds in […]
Last month, Smithsonian Folkways released an album of ancient songs from the Chornobyl region, songs all but forgotten due to the nuclear disaster that wiped out the nearby villages. Fortunately, some of these songs have been preserved thanks to ethnomusicologist Yevhen Yefremov and Ensemble Hilka: “Under the musical direction of Yevhen Yefremov, an ethnomusicologist […]
In the diaspora I grew up singing certain Ukrainian folk songs, which I thought every Ukrainian in Ukraine knew, so I was surprised to find out that it wasn’t true. I grew up in a community made mostly of descendants of Galician immigrants and was a member of the scouting […]
I’ve noticed that many of the common Ukrainian diasporan first names (my name included, which I already posted about here) are unheard of or rarities in Ukraine. Many of the Ukrainian diasporan names were historically widely (or only) used in Galicia (as opposed to other parts of Ukraine), and some […]
In one of Lviv’s cafes, Dim Lehend (House of Legends), there is a room dedicated to the old Galician language (which is similar to the language spoken in the diaspora). Old words and old newspaper clippings decorate the walls.
