By Oleksandr Simchuk for Amnesia Master tilemaker Oleksa Bakhmatiuk (1820-1882) is the most famous representative of the Kosiv school of ceramics and perhaps the most successful Ukrainian artist of the nineteenth century. A lion playing with a wheel, a bear on the flute warming up a violinist, street artists dancing […]
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Today, both the Poles and Ukrainians have a beloved song about the Hutsul Carpathian highlanders, sung in their own languages to a similar melody. How did this come to be? The Polish Story Karpaccy Górale We must first look back at the first half of the nineteenth century. This is […]
The Six-Petal Rosette The six-petal rosette (also known as a hexafoil), the flower-like symbol created by overlapping seven circles, as well as the expanded variants with 7 interlocking rosettes and 19 interlocking rosettes (the latter is called the “Flower of Life” in the New Age movement), is an ancient symbol […]
Teodor Axentowicz (1859-1938), a renowned Polish-Armenian painter and the first elected rector of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, was born in Braşov, Hungary (now Romania). His father’s family had Armenian roots and owned a small property in Ceniów, near Brody. Axentowicz grew up in Lwów (Lviv) and after […]
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 […]
