“When carols are no longer sung, the world will come to its end,” shared these words of wisdom 95-year-old Hanna Narizhna from Ivky. She heard it from her grandmother.
The “Portal Through the Centuries: Bohuslav Carols” project team actively continues the expeditions to the villages of the community, where we collect valuable materials: memories, stories, songs, traditions, customs, and rituals.
And for now, we would like to share a brief account of one of the most recent expeditions. As you may have already guessed, we visited the village of Ivky in the Bohuslavshchyna to see Hanna Narizhna.
Hanna is a native of the Semyhory village, a survivor of the war (during which she lost her father) and of famine. When she was 6 years old only, she was forced to work as a labourer for strangers. There she grazed a cow and looked after a baby. At the age of 6 (!). When she returned home the next year, she was given a dress and shoes, but she had to give them to her sister, as her sister had to go to school properly dressed. Hanna stayed in the house alone.
She had worked on a collective farm all her life and recalled the days of hard labour for a piece of bread. With great love and awe, she mentioned her husband, whom she had waited for to come home from the military service, as they were destined to be together. Together they moved to Ivky.
She performed 5 carols and 2 shchedrivka, as well as shared many stories about the rituals and customs: how children and adults carolled, what treats they served, what they wore, how they “walked the goat”, how they held a festive evening with a ‘kalyta’ [a bakery product] on St Andrew’s Day, and how they ‘begged’ for spring to be mild on Melanka day. Follow this link to listen to Hanna Narizhna’s story about carolling, and this link to her story about Easter.
“Back then, there were no sweets, we baked gingerbread, bagels, pies. That kind of thing. But I wasn’t interested in treats much, I was more interested in walking around and singing carols,” Hanna Narizhna recalls about the carolling.
Hanna Narizhna also showed a bunch of photographs of great value, as they show, for example, images and certain items of clothing or their elements.
Such expeditions and encounters are indeed like a portal where you find yourself in the past and seem to live through every moment that people describe. These expeditions are precious and remind us again that we must revive our history and culture, which we have in abundance in every region.
