Some interesting memories were recorded during the expedition in the village of Chaiky from Mariia Rybalka (Malchenko), born in 1936.
Mariia Rybalka told us about the way they used to yarn while she was a child:
“There were five of us in the family, two of us died when we were kids, and one of us was of an age of a teenager. I started weaving when I was a kid, right after the war, as soon as I started school… [further she describes the process] They used to sow hemp. They picked out the flat part of the hemp, it was the kind of hemp that had no seeds in it. And the mother plant remained, the seed was on it. They used to make milk from it for the children, because the German Nazis took away the cattle, and there was nothing left to feed the children. In Dybyntsi, they made pots and the family used to grind the hemp in those pots to make milk, pour it into porridge and feed it to us. Then the hemp was taken to the river, to Ros, and soaked in the river for two weeks. They knitted handfuls of hemp, and put them in water and covered them with soil. And when the hemp is soaked, they used to carry it to the shore on their shoulders… They arranged it, dried it, and brought it home. Afterwards, they made a beater (“betelnytsia”) – a kind of bend with a clapper – and beated the hemp in it. Sawdust came out. Then, the fibres that remained were rubbed with a grinder. Afterwards, we used to gather in someone’s house or at home and crush the fibres with our feet to make the thread soft. After crushing them, we used to comb out the so-called ‘mychka’. And then we used a brush to comb it out so that there was no sawdust left. And then we yarned it. They used to make a spindle, and they would wind the threads on it, thoroughly counting them. The result is a thread that is bleached in wooden jars made of willow. Then we heated water in Dybyntsi pots, poured it into the jar, covered it with ashes since there was no soap, and threw stones into it. And then we used the spindle again, put a hanging on it and spun the threads into balls. We carried them to the weavers. Then we bleached the cloth and laid it out on the riverbank. Back then, people used to walk across the river. Nowadays, few people go over the river, except for some summer houses, but back then, when we bleached, [there were] many people. We soaked it in water and always put it on one side. It turned grey on one side and white on the other. And then shirts were sewn from that cloth.”
She talks about working conditions on the collective farm:
“There was a rule in the collective farm under the soviet regime: if you failed to work the minimum, three hundred labour days, you were not entitled to a year’s service into the record. Say, if I missed work today and was assigned three hectares of beetroot to weed, I would be fined. I ought to go to work, but the children were small… I joined the youth group at once, there were 16 people in the group, 12 of the groups. No money was paid, they gave only 300 grams of wheat per working day per person. And you had to give that wheat to the collective farm because it was intended for procurement. And the money, 20 kopecks each, had to go there too.
In 1947, after the war, we had the same hunger strike as in 1937. People were starving to death. In Dybyntsi, there was a dip where there was white clay. My father told me, if you want to go to school, take the clay and go to Karapyshi, sell it and buy paper, those were sheets of paper to be used to make school notebooks.”
On the ancient wooden St Nicholas Church of the mid-eighteenth century in the village of Chaiky:
“The church was wooden. After the war, it was turned into a barn, and we used to grind sod there, we had a farm in the area. The alder fields were ripped up, and the church looked like in Rozkopantsi. Then communists set it on fire. In the middle of the day, when we were working in the field, suddenly we saw a big fire in Chaiky. We arrived there, and no one was fighting the fire.”
In the days of independent Ukraine, a new church of stone and brick was built on the site of the church burned down to the ground in the 1980s.
We also recorded Mariia Rybalka singing the carol “Oh, the Dim Day of Birth of the Son of God” and what she heard from her parents about the Holodomor of 1932-1933.
