Nová Sedlica: A travel essay

The church of St Michael the Archangel at Uličské Krivé

"The New Rusyn Times" of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,  published my travel essay, "Nová Sedlica", in its Spring 2017 (Volume 24, Number 1) issue. The essay concerns the Rusyn lands in eastern Slovakia. "The New Rusyn Times" is a hard-copy-only journal without an on-line presence. I have reproduced the essay here, with minor variations.

The wooded ridge rising to the east of us forms the end of Slovakia, the end of the European Union. Beyond is the Ukraine. From the other side of the border, the sun is rising into a cloudless sky. It burnishes the early autumn colours of the forest on the western hills and turns the morning mist that still lingers there pink. A cock crows. A vague scent of wood smoke hangs in the still air.

Nová Sedlica is the easternmost village in Slovakia and the highest settlement in the valley that runs south from here - through Zboj, then a through a gorge to Uličské Krivé, to Ulič, the largest village in the valley. There the river is joined by waters coming down from Prislop, Topol'a and Ruský Potok. From Ulič the Ulička River flows on past a low-lying derelict factory with a large statue of Jesus on his cross standing guard in front of it, past policemen training dogs, past broken farm buildings... to the end of the road and a sign that says you can go no farther. The border is just ahead. There is no official crossing here.

The water, of course, flows on, heedless of the international frontier, ignoring the end of the European Union, to join the River Už at Velykyi Bereznyi and then on past the walls of Užhorod - the citadel of the Už. This barrier in front of you marks a new border, here only since 1945. Between the two world wars Czechoslovakia included the land beyond. This was the country's long tail, Czechoslovakia's far-eastern province of Ruthenia, Sub-Carpathian Rus'. Earlier still, and for hundreds of years, the lands on both sides of this eastern border were part of the Kingdom of Hungary. Before the 1945 border - then between Czechoslovakia and the U.S.S.R. - was set here, Velykyi Bereznyi (now across the border in Ukraine) was the market town for these now-Slovakian valleys, collectively known as the Ulič Valley. Today, the villages here are cut off from that route into the outside world and to get into the rest of Slovakia, the rest of the European Union, you have to drive over the pass at the head of the valley above Prislop - which gives the Ulič Valley a particularly remote, world's-end feel. Its remoteness no doubt contributes to the evident poverty and high levels of unemployment here. Slovakia is one of the poorer countries in the European Union, with a GDP per capita of 57% of the European average. It is also the country in the EU with the most marked regional disparities - some areas in the east have a GDP per capita only 28% that of the richer areas in the west of the country.

The previous afternoon we walked through the village of Nová Sedlica. The walnut trees along the bank of the river were shedding their fruit and the vegetable gardens of the stout houses look well picked over.  The houses themselves, all of post-war construction, seemed to be bedding down for winter. Large piles of firewood had been gathered. We passed signs that bore the ring of golden stars on a blue field marking projects to which European Union funds had contributed. Another sign, with a white cross on a red background, noted the support of the Swiss Confederation. After walking for half an hour, we came to the top end of the village and to an information office - now closed for the season - for the Poloniny National Park. Here the road ends and the hiking trail to Kremenec begins. It is marked by a park information sign that tells hikers about the bears (ursos arctos arctos) that live out this way.

The Poloniny National Park is said to be particularly rich in wildlife. Eurasian bears - as well as boar, deer, badger, wolf, fox and even a recently reintroduced herd of European bison - are among the 55 species of wild mammal in the park. While we were there we only saw a lone small deer in a recently harvested field, a fox with a white-tipped tail and a dark squirrel scampering away between the trees. Nová Sedlica and Ulič both have a wolf on their village crest and they say that in the Ulič Valley you will go to sleep to the sound of wolves howling and wake to the cock's crow. We heard the cock in the morning, but not the wolf in the evening.

Most of the walkers who come to Nová Sedlica come to walk the trail up to Kremenec, the forested height of land where three countries - Slovakia, Poland and Ukraine - meet and also the endpoint on a long-distance hiking trail that follows the top of the main Carpathian ridge, right along the border between Poland to the north and Slovakia to the south. Kremenec also lends its name to the small hotel in Nová Sedlica - Penzión Kremenec - all bright yellow paint, golden-coloured wood and immaculately clean. Seated on its porch, two men with short grey hair, camouflage-pattern trousers and beery grins waved greetings as we arrived. Beer is cheap here - €0.60 to €0.80 for a half-litre glass. Per unit of alcohol, vodka is probably even cheaper.

Natasha, daughter of the woman who owns Penzión Kremenec and the village grocery shop on the other side of the courtyard, once lived in England. "It was a long time ago, when we still needed a visa," she said. She stayed three years: first as an au pair in Wolverhampton - "like a big sister to a fourteen-year-old girl whose parents were a policeman and a policewoman" - then as a receptionist in two different hotels in Birmingham. "I spoke good English then. I've forgotten it now."

One night, on duty on the reception desk at the Day's Inn in Birmingham, Natasha was confronted by a man with a gun. "I didn't know whether it was a real gun or not. He was on drugs. I did what he asked. I opened the safe and gave him the money." After that she didn't feel comfortable going home on the buses after eleven o'clock at night. "I didn't like the cold and the rain, either." She decided to return home. "I felt safer here, at home. I prefer it. I have gone away and I can compare." Her younger sister also went to Britain, to London in her case. She only lasted two months before returning to Nová Sedlica. They were fortunate. They had something to return to.

Emigration has long been a feature of this corner of the world. Almost ever since these valleys were first settled in the 14th and 15th centuries, the population growth has been too much for the marginal land here to support. Indeed, records suggest that the original village on the site of Nová Sedlica - then known as Rozdiel - was abandoned in the late 16th or early 17th century, before being re-established under the name Nová Sedlica (meaning "new settlement") sometime before 1623, when records show taxes again being paid.

After a series of peasant uprisings in the 17th and early 18th centuries, there was a great migration southwards into lands newly reconquered from the Ottomans. Colonies of their descendants still exist in the lands they settled. Some 35,000 Rusyn-speakers live in Serbia and Croatia today. But in feudal times it was not always easy to leave. Feudal owners of the land counted their wealth in human beings. Serfdom was only abolished in the Kingdom of Hungary in 1848. With freedom, however, good times did not necessarily arrive.

When the railways came to Galicia on the north side of the mountains in the late 19th century, a new emigration route opened. Many from here travelled across the mountains and took the train to Hamburg or Bremen and thence a ship to the United States. Most went Pennsylvania, some to the coal mines around Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, some to the steel mills around Pittsburgh. By 1914, 225,000 Rusyns had relocated to the United States. In the all-encompassing words of a local museum, "Poverty, famine and lack of employment opportunities were the causes of massive emigration."

Scattered throughout the valleys of the eastern Carpathians - in Poland, Slovakia, the Ukraine and into Romania - are small wooden churches, many, though not all, belonging to the Greek Catholic rite. In Slovakia, UNESCO has adopted eight of them, though none of them in the Ulič Valley. Here, however, three wooden churches, all from the early 18th century, still stand - at Uličské Krivé (1718), at Ruský Potok (1740) and at Topol'a (1700). Each of them is a Greek Catholic church and each is dedicated to Michael the Archangel.

We set off from the old wooden church at Uličské Krivé following a trail marked in blue on the map, and in white-blue-white flashes on the ground, towards Ruský Potok and Topol'a. The track as it leaves the village is a broad one. We passed thin haystacks made in the old pre-mechanised way around a pole. We passed a makeshift sawmill and a stack of newly sawn beech planks and then, a short distance farther on, the straight trunks of newly harvested beech trees, denuded of their branches. Other than subsistence agriculture, forestry has long been the main economic activity in this region. After passing the naked beech logs we started to climb. The track became deeply rutted in places, the ruts made by the big-wheeled logging vehicles that had passed this way. In some of these ruts there was mud and standing water and there we could see the hoof prints of animals who had come to drink. An adder crossed the path in front of us.

This is a mixed deciduous forest; but most of the trees are new-growth beech here, their leaves just beginning to turn from green to gold. The woods were curiously silent. There was no birdsong and, because there was no wind, no rustling of leaves. No distant sound of roads or cities. No other people. While it was pleasant to walk alone among the trees, there was disappointingly no view beyond them. Even when, on the top of the ridge before descending towards Ruský Potok, we came to a wooden tower at the edge of a field, we could not see beyond the perimeter of trees.

Then, on the way back to Uličské Krivé, the deep silence was broken. We heard from a long way off, and then saw and smelled, one of the logging vehicles whose big, heavy-tread tyres had made the ruts in our path. The vehicle, rolling its noisy way across the terrain, dragged from a chain behind it six or seven newly harvested beech trunks, smashing through any vegetation careless enough to get in their way and leaving shiny smooth scars on the track where they had passed. We followed the noise and the diesel fumes, watched the driver offload the logs and then walked back to the village. There, sitting in an old wheelbarrow beside a village street, was a bright-yellow child's toy. It was a plastic replica of the machine that hauls the logs out of the woods. Another generation prepares to follow its fathers into the woods. It's either that or emigrate.

The roof of the church at Uličské Krivé

By the wooden church at Uličské Krivé we met a man who introduced himself as a "tree campaigner". During the course of our conversation we spoke about the logging we had seen on our walk and, in defence of the loggers, I pointed out that, according to our map at least, the land where we had been walking did not strictly belong within the national park. He looked up at the hills and pointed to a hillside just to the north of where we had walked. "Clear cut," he said. "And that definitely is in the national park."

Although on our walk that day we had only seen young-growth beech, there are, deep in the Poloniny National Park, stands of old-growth beech, primeval forest never touched by generations of logging operations. Three of them, and six more across the border in the Ukraine, are designated by UNESCO as part of the World Heritage Site "Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians". There in these remote reserves the ecology of the old beech woods that once covered much more of these mountains has been left undisturbed by man. "There," said the tree campaigner, "you can see trees this big." He stretched his arms as wide as they would reach.

The Church of Michael the Archangel at Ruský Potok sits atop a rise in the centre of the village. Next to it, within the  perimeter of the church's low wooden fence, with its own little wooden roof all along its length, another - more modern - church has been built. It is the latter that is now used by the community for worship, except for special occasions. The old wooden church at Ruský Potok is so small, its nave so narrow, even compared to the other tiny wooden churches in the Carpathians, that the iconostasis within has to be bent onto the side walls to fit.

The church of St Michael the Archangel at Ruský Potok

The people in the Ulič Valley self identify as Rusyn or Rusnak or Ruthenian. In the past, both Ukrainians and Belarusians have also referred to themselves and their language as Ruthenian. They all belong to the same East Slavic language family, but only the Rusyns continue to refer to themselves as Ruthenian. Rusyn is either a dialect of Ukrainian or a separate language closely related to Ukrainian, depending on whom you speak to.

Rusyn is generally written - like its East Slavic cousins Belarusian, Ukrainian and Russian - in Cyrillic characters, though sometimes it is also written in the Latin alphabet. The question of what is and what is not a separate Slavic language, and by what name they are known, have long been contentious issues. At the Pan-Slavic Conference in Prague in 1848 the Russian delegation strongly resisted the idea that Belarusian or Ukrainian, let alone its Rusyn variant, should be recognised as a distinct language separate from Russian. At times the people of this region have even been called Carpatho-Russians.

At the end of the First World War, the people living here and immediately across the border in the Ukraine were called Uhro-Rusyns, from the fact that they were Rusyn speakers living in what was then the Kingdom of Hungary. The Rusyns had never been part of the same political entity as their Ukrainian and Belarusian brethren and, in that time when ethnic self-determination was the latest thing in political thought, there was even the passing notion that they should have their own country. Instead, at the end of the First World War, Rusyn lands became inter-war Czechoslovakia's far east. That idea that the Rusyn homelands should form part of the new country of Czechoslovakia came, interestingly, from emigrants living in the United States. Gregory Zatkovitch, an American of Ruthenian origin and a prominent proponent of the idea of Ruthenia becoming part of Czechoslovakia, went on to become the first governor of its Subcarpathian Rus' province. When, in 1939, as Hitler was breaking Czechoslovakia up, Ruthenia declared its peaceful independence, it only lasted for a single day - the ides of March 1939. It took three days, and several hundreds (if not thousands) dead, for the whole of the newly born country to be subdued by the invading Hungarian army.

Rusyn is spoken in eastern Slovakia in the valleys all along the southern slopes of the Carpathians as far west as the High Tatras. The language is also spoken farther east, into the Ukraine, throughout most of the Ukrainian oblast of Zakarpattia. While some 100,000 Rusyns live in Slovakia today, somewhere between 600,000 and 900,000 Rusyns live across the border in Ukraine. It is difficult to be more accurate: Ukraine does not recognise Rusyn as a separate language. Another 40,000 or so Rusyns live in Poland. Their historical homeland is on the northern slopes of the Carpathians.  There, since the early twentieth century, they have been known as the Lemko people.

When I asked Natasha what language she spoke she said that she spoke "Rusyn and Slovakian, but at home I speak Rusyn. Everyone here speaks Rusyn. Some of the older people speak only Rusyn and don't really even understand Slovakian well." For Natasha, there was no question that her native language might be simply a dialect of Ukrainian.

The Rusyns traditionally identify with the Greek Catholic Church. This hybrid between eastern and western Christianity came about through the Union of Uzhhorod in 1645. Under the terms of the Union (hence the alternative name "Uniate") Ruthenian Orthodox priests in what was then the Kingdom of Hungary agreed to join the Catholic Church and accept the Pope as their leader provided they could keep the eastern - Orthodox - form of worship, could choose their own bishops and would receive the same benefits as Roman Catholic clergy. In all this they were closely following the example of their Orthodox brethren in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to the north who, in 1596 at the Union of Brest, had accepted the Pope in Rome as their spiritual head.

Well to the west of Nová Sedlica and Ruský Potok, in the centre of the town of Svidnik, there is an excellent museum dedicated to the history and culture of the Rusyn people in Slovakia and the lands they inhabit. The afternoon we visited the so-called "Museum of Ukrainian Culture in Svidnik" there was nobody else there other than the woman on the desk. You would never find such ideal museum-visiting conditions for a museum of comparable quality in London. 

The Svidnik museum's name betrays a certain bias in the debate as to whether Rusyn is only a dialect of Ukrainian or a separate language in its own right, but the museum's exhibits themselves and the texts that accompany them (in Slovak, Rusyn and English) are more nuanced. When, for example, considering the pressures on Rusyn culture and identity during the Communist period, the text by the related exhibits tells of three particularly unpopular measures: the collectivisation of farming, the forced conversion from Greek Catholicism to Orthodoxy and the Ukrainisation of the language. The politics underlying all three measures, at a time of Soviet domination, are clear. Only with the end of Soviet domination has the pressure to conform Rusyn to Ukrainian ended - in Slovakia at least. Rusyn was codified there for the first time in 1995.

Among the exhibits in the Svidnik museum you can also see the expenses for the church of Nová Sedlica in 1859, an early 19th century decree appointing one A. Fircak as priest of the village of Uličské Krivé, a 16th century census record for Jalová and a 1635 tax record for several villages including Topol'a.

World War I military cemetery at Topol'a

When you approach the Church of Michael the Archangel at Topol'a, you come first to a field of wooden crosses, each atop a rectangular mound and each with its own little roof in the shape of an inverted "V". This is a First World War military cemetery. A plaque at the entrance to the cemetery shows, alongside a plan of who is buried where, a map of where the eastern front lay on 20 April 1915. "Toploya" is marked on the map. The front ran along the main Carpathian ridge just to the north of the village. Beyond, the land in the former Austrian province of Galicia, had been taken by the Russian Army.

Yet the wooden church on the hill here survived when the conflict destroyed most of the village of Topol'a. Inside, the iconostasis is bright. It was sent to Bratislava for restoration and stayed there for five years before returning. Services now are again held in the church but, lamented the man who came with the key to let us in and show us round, only about ten times a year. The village is a shadow of its former self, he said, "once there were seven hundred people here, now we are less than a hundred. The old die. The young have all gone." He wore a gauze glove on his right hand. He had, he said, recently lost all four fingers on one of his hands to a chain saw. He peeled back the bandage. The scar was still raw and red.

 The church of St Michael the Archangel at Topol'a

Topol'a, Ruský Potok and Uličské Krivé have the only wooden churches today standing in place in the Ulič Valley. Once every village had one. In a park in Ulič there is a model of each one of them, those that remain and those that are gone. Ulič's own wooden church was demolished in the 19th century to make way for a more modern and larger brick church. Others fell victim to the two world wars that passed this way.

During the First World War, the Austro-Hungary Army adopted scorched earth tactics in the Ulič Valley to deny shelter to the invading Russians. Nová Sedlica was left with only its wooden church and one wooden cottage standing. War came again in the autumn of 1944. Fierce fighting engulfed the valley as the retreating Germans put up stiff resistance in this difficult terrain - until the village was liberated by the Red Army on 16 October 1944. Ninety percent of the houses in Nová Sedlica, all built since the end of the previous war, were destroyed at this time. Caught between the armies, fourteen civilians from Nová Sedlica died; and the Germans took with them as they left any livestock and food that they could find. Troubled times continued after Liberation. Ukrainian nationalist guerrillas roamed the area, particularly targeting communists and Jews who, in these remote valleys, had survived the Nazi's Holocaust. On 25 November 1945, they murdered three villagers in Nová Sedlica. The following year, nineteen people died of typhoid. But again, through the destruction all around wrought by the Second World War, Nová Sedlica's wooden church building survived.

The Church of Michael the Archangel of Nová Sedlica still stands to this day, but not in Nová Sedlica. In the 1970s, in the days of the hard-line Communists who came to power with the Soviet tanks that crushed the Prague Spring in 1968, it was dismantled and removed to the Skanzen in the town of Hummené, some 60 kilometres to the west. There it stands, re-assembled, as the prime exhibit in the outdoor museum of rural architecture on a small hill behind the park adjacent to Hummené's Renaissance Palace. The palace on this site once belonged to the Drugeth family, once the feudal owners of the largest estate in the entire Kingdom of Hungary, an estate which encompassed Nová Sedlica and all the other villages of the Ulič Valley. Now it just has Nová Sedlica's church.

The church sits on low stone foundations. The lower layers of the wooden walls are made of massive squared-off logs hewn from tree trunks far larger than those we watched being dragged out of the woods above Uličské Krivé. The roofs are made of cleft wooden shingles. While the three old wooden churches still standing in the Ulič Valley each has two towers, the Nová Sedlica church has three, the highest above the main entrance, the lowest above the sacristy at the eastern end. Each of the towers is topped off by the eastern three-bar cross. As with the other churches, you need to bend when you enter - only standing erect again when you come to the space in front of the iconostasis.

 The church of St Michael the Archangel from Nová Sedlica

Now standing in an outdoor architecture museum in Hummené

The iconostasis here is very similar to the ones we saw in other Greek Catholic wooden churches still in situ in the Carpathians. It leaves one in no doubt that this is a church of the eastern rite, even if still acknowledging the Pope as head of the Church. The top row of the iconostasis has a series of portraits of Old Testament figures. The next row has Jesus in the centre and six of the twelve apostles to his right and six to his left. The third row depicts the major feasts of the church calendar, with the Last Supper in the middle. At eye level, the four main icons are arranged as they would be in almost any orthodox church. To the right of the central door in the iconostasis is Jesus holding the Book; to the left is the Virgin Mary. On Jesus' right is Michael the Archangel. You can always tell to whom an Orthodox church is dedicated by looking at the icon to the right of Jesus. At the far left is St Nicholas. These four rest on the fifth layer - four other icons at ground level.

The church from Zboj - the village just downstream from Nová Sedlica - has taken an even longer journey. Like many of its erstwhile parishioners, the building has emigrated from the Ulič Valley. To see it you need to travel some 150 kilometres west to the leafy glades of a spa resort that goes by the name of Bardejovské Kupelé. Today there is a mixture of architectural styles in the buildings among the trees there - modern residences, communist-era blocks, interwar villas and the decaying but still-used remains of a more elegant and less egalitarian age. For, as Bad Bartfeld, this spa town once entertained the likes of Tsar Alexander I of Russia and Marie-Louise, daughter of the Habsburg Emperor and second wife of Napoleon. A statue of Empress Elisabeth, wife of the long-reigning Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, still takes centre stage in the town.

Sisi, as Elisabeth was known, was married to the Emperor when she was only sixteen. She found neither the state of matrimony nor the life that she was expected to live as Empress entirely to her liking and spent more time away from her husband than she did with him in the imperial palaces of Vienna. In the Hofburg Palace in Vienna there is now a museum devoted to her, tracing her life from beautiful teenager to melancholy middle-aged wanderer. In Geneva a simple plaque on the railings by the lakeside marks the spot where she was assassinated by a knife-wielding Italian anarchist.

Ici fut assassinée

le 10 septembre 1898

S. M. Elisabeth

Impératrice d'Autriche

Here in Bardejovské Kupelé, however, in the inscription on the pedestal of her statue, she is Queen of Hungary. In her time this once-elegant spa town in the foothills of the Carpathians was part of the Kingdom of Hungary. Sisi developed a deep love for Hungary and was instrumental in introducing the concept of the dual monarchy into the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The woman murdered on the quay in Geneva was Elisabeth Empress of Austria and Elisabeth Queen of Hungary.

On a hillside in the Skanzen - Bardejovské Kupelé's open-air Museum - where the rich and titled once played, the old wooden church building that used to serve the humble parishioners of Zboj, has come to find a new home. Here it stands, far away from the dying isolated valley on the borders of the European Union where it was first built, an uprooted and very fine specimen of, as the curators will tell you, Carpathian folk architecture.