Research and Expeditions Archives - Навколо Нас

Female Fashion Preferences in Medvyn in the 1940s and 1950s. Our Expedition to Medvyn

skrynka2012@ — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 22:56:00 +0000

August 6, 2024

In Medvyn, on the edge of Gedzivka, our expedition team was hospitably welcomed by Nina Rozsokhina (née Skopenko), born in 1944, and Tetiana Vasylenko (née Plaksun), born in 1946. We were meeting in Nina’s yard, near the Intercession Church, which was rebuilt on the premises of a parish school in independent Ukraine. The old church was burned down in 1920 by the budyonovets, who were punishing Medvyn town residents for the anti-Bolshevik uprising and for their desire for a free Ukraine.

Ms Nina recalls the times when her mother used to gather hemp in Medvyn, spun it into thread and then wove shirts: “They sowed hemp in the best soil. It grew so tall and aromatic. We picked the plants, dried them, carried them to the pond, put them on the bottom and threw silt on them. When they were removed, the fibres had to be separated from the stem. Then they would take a bowl, put the hemp in it, and crush it. The hard stuff – the fescue – would fall off. What remained was the fibre, it was twisted into spindles. Then they would comb it. We used a chair with a hole where a comb with teeth as thin as a finger was inserted. My mother would sit on it and pull the hemp. Threads were spun from these combed fibres.”

And here’s what they say about the clothes worn by Medvyn women in the 1940s and 1950s (when Ms Nina and Ms Tetiana were children):

“For work, shirts were made of thicker cloth, and for holidays of thinner cloth. Cross-stitching was popular and cuffs were embroidered. The shirt was assembled with lace. They would pull out 3-4 threads, then use a needle to gather them into a row at the top and at the bottom. The process of washing: people would take a kind of tub for bucking from an old willow tree, without a bottom. Cherry twigs were placed on the bottom, then straw. They would throw the shirts in, take lye, and pour hot water on the lye. The shirts would be pressed, and the water would leak out for a long time. Then they would put those shirts on a yoke: when in winter, then carry them to the ice-hole or to the pond [when in summer], and there were planks and stakes around each pond.

The aprons were embroidered. They were white, made of percale, embroidered with satin stitch. There was lace on the bottom and flowers on the top. They no longer wore plakhta back then. The belts were red, decorated, made of thin wool, and tied on the side.

They wore a gerset, an embroidered vest.

They used to wear chushka on the head like a yarmulka, but it was hard, grey, and was tied with a seam at the back, and then stuck.

They wore thorn scarves: plain, black, with shiny silk tassels. It was all the vogue! They wore cashmere scarves, brownish with white edges. There was also a large shawl, about 2.5 by 2.5 metres, black with white stripes. It was not tied but thrown over the shoulders. It was worn on snowy days.

They used to wear necklaces: corals, dukachi. Corals were made of six coral beads. My aunt Olha had a carved necklace like this, and my aunt Maria had dukachi. They also used to wear polished necklaces with sharpened beads in dark red. This necklace would end with a flower-shaped textile garment gathered with red tassels.

The earrings were flattish, golden.

The boots were chrome (box calf), and all the shoes were black.

The svyta they wore was dark brown, with ruffles, and they were loose on the back. There were also white, greyish svyta. They were wide, extended to the bottom, with lace at the bottom, decorated with curves or satin. Men also wore chemerka, a cloth cloak with a removable hood (or bashlyk), which had long ‘ears’. The bashlyk was usually used in bad weather.”

The expedition was organized as part of the “Clothing and Tradition. Bohuslavshchyna” project by “Around Us. UA” NGO, where we record the testimonies of elderly people about the folk costumes that used to be traditional in our homeland, the ways they dressed, weaved, and collected folklore.

The project ‘Clothing and Traditions. Bohuslavshchyna’ is supported by the Partnership for a Strong Ukraine Fund, which is funded by the governments of Canada, Estonia, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.

Record Female Fashion Preferences in Medvyn in the 1940s and 1950s. Our Expedition to Medvyn will first appear on Навколо Нас.

Learning to Make a Flower with Sofia Hohulia from Medvyn

skrynka2012@ — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 22:44:00 +0000

July 31, 2024

The second time we visited Sofia Hohulia from Medvyn (born in 1937), we asked her to teach us how to make a ‘flower’ – the local equivalent of ‘didukh’, which was crafted at the end of the harvest season, ceremonially celebrated on the Saviour’s Day and used at Christmas.

‘We reap wheat or rye, oats, barley and braid them into bouquets. You take rye or wheat [for the bouquet] and say it’s for the goat’s beard. Then you wrap the bouquet’s stems with straw [from that bouquet]. Then more bouquets are tied to the sides of the bouquet to make it lush, like a tree. In the end, four legs are bent from the woven stems at the bottom, and the middle is cut off,’ says Ms Sofia.

‘When exactly was it made, on the Saviour’s Day?’, we asked Sofia Hohulia.

‘When the harvest was over, we took a bundle of those spikelets and made a flower. We didn’t do it on a holiday, because if you do anything on a holiday, you’ll definitely get sick. Later it was taken to church and blessed,’ says Sofia.

Elderly Medvyn villagers remember that before a functioning Orthodox church appeared in Medvyn on Mykoliia in the mid-20th century, blessings were performed around a 600-year-old oak tree standing in the cemetery opposite the church.

Did they make any ‘flowers’ in your village?

This project is supported by the Partnership for a Strong Ukraine Fund, which is funded by the governments of Canada, Estonia, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.

Record Learning to Make a Flower with Sofia Hohulia from Medvyn will first appear on Навколо Нас.

Memoirs of a Relative of Otaman Yukhym Tsiurupa from Rozkopantsi Village. The Story is Told by Nadiia Tsiurupa

skrynka2012@ — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 23:15:30 +0000

January 20, 2024

Otaman Yukhym Tsiurupa (born in 1896) from Rozkopantsi had two older brothers: Ivan (born in 1884) and Havrylo (born in 1889).

In the Museum of the History of the Bohuslav Region, we found out that Ivan Tsiurupa participated in the insurgency during the Ukrainian Revolution and was killed. Havrylo Tsiurupa was shot by the Soviets in 1938 in Kyiv and secretly buried in Bykivnia. Only the youngest of the brothers, Otaman Yukhym Tsiurupa, who fought against the Bolsheviks in the Bohuslav region in 1920 on the side of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, lived to a ripe old age and died of natural causes.

At the beginning of October last year, we undertook an expedition to the village of Rozkopantsi near Bohuslav to visit the otaman’s relative Nadiia Tsiurupa (Serby), the granddaughter of the middle brother, Havrylo Tsiurupa. The first part about our expedition can be found here. And here follows the story of Nadiia Tsiurupa:

“My grandfather Havrylo graduated from Tomsk State University. In 1908, he worked as a clerk in the Kainsk city public administration (now Kuibyshevo, Novosibirsk region), from 1909 to 1921 he worked as an official in Tomsk in the provincial military presence, and from 1913 to 1915 he was a first-rank cashier of the Kainsk district treasury, in 1915 he was a clerk, and in 1916 he was drafted into the tsarist army. My grandfather had many plots of land, the Lendivshchyna tract belonged to my grandfather.

Гаврило Цюрупа, 1908 р. / Havrylo Tsiurupa, 1908

His brother, my grandfather Yukhym, graduated from a military school and was a captain… He was very hot-tempered, a troublemaker, and perhaps that’s why he was sent to a military school… My grandfather Havrylo was very calm. In 1919, my grandfather Havrylo returned to Bohuslav region. And [his brother] Yukhym was already in 1919 with Otaman Zelenyi… My father told me that Yukhym came to Bohuslavshchyna with Ukrainian officers. And here they stayed on their own, until they joined Zelenyi… He would come to his grandmother’s house and leave his horse where our forest was, where there were lots of viburnum bushes. Grandma Hanna said that he had a white horse. So he went to my grandmother’s house. Grandma said that her husband Ilko went outside (they lived at the bottom and our house was on the top). And, he said, he heard shooting. And there were many horses. And he saw that one horse was without a rider. He [Yukhym] wounded one of them, and they left. The next day, the police arrived, the whole yard was full of Red Army soldiers. They started to ransack the place, and Yukhym was sitting in the woods with a machine gun and watching. And if necessary, my grandmother said, he would shoot at them. They tried to ambush him many times, but they failed to capture him.

Elderly people used to say that my grandfather was a bandit, but I was not offended, I was always proud… My father said that they were supporting Ukrainian independence from russia, and especially fighting for peasant Ukraine. And I used to stand on a chair, raise my hand and say, “I will be standing for a free Ukraine, just like my grandfather Yukhym.” I never thought it would ever happen.

Yukhym’s unit frequented Bohuslav and Tarashchany districts. And people in Bohuslav kept him in mind. Once my mother was in hospital and they called her by her family name. An old Jew was sitting there and asked her where was Otaman Tsiurupa and if he was alive. My mother did not confess that she was a relative, she only said that they were just namesakes.

Юхим Цюрупа, 1931 р., Польща / Yukhym Tsiurupa, 1931, Poland

This is Yukhym [in the photo], already in Poland. He had already crossed the border, it was 1931. He was a participant in the First Winter Campaign. And my son started looking for whether it was true or not. And he found out indeed that it was true. Yukhym, a centurion in the Ukrainian People’s Army, was among those awarded the Iron Cross of Petliura.

Their older brother Ivan, who died, had two sons, Ivan and Havrylo. And the boys, according to my father, were quite hefty. And there was another son, Semen, who was born to his wife from another man since Ivan died. And these boys were once walking from the river to the village. They were walking through a field when they saw an activist lying stabbed to death. And the boys called for help, and the people accused them, and the boys were exiled, my father never saw them again. This is probably in the 1930s.

[For the last time] Yukhym came to his mother’s house in Bohuslavshchyna and invited his brother Havrylo to join him abroad. Havrylo said, “I have only one homeland. That’s what the grandfather Yukhym, when he was writing letters, mentioned [about it]. And Havrylo didn’t go… Yukhym had a friend, also Tsiurupa, Sylvester, Nightingale as he used to be called. He was also in his unit. They arrived in a cart, unharnessed the horses, and threw the cart into a deep ditch where the farm is now. They invited the brother, but he refused, so they bid him farewell and left. And, apparently, when they were crossing the border, Sylvester was shot dead. Yukhym got married there [in Poland], his wife was German, and he had two factories.

My father recalled that during the famine, his grandfather Yukhym used to send petliovka to his family from Poland. Petliovka is flour. He rescued us from the famine. And, thanks to Yukhym, we survived, he says.

My grandfather Havrylo worked as an accountant at a workmen’s cooperative association, then in a road company, and in Stalin’s time, he was demoted. There was a denunciation from a fellow villager that my grandfather Havrylo was agitating against the soviet government… And on 6 February 1938, my father woke up to find the house full of police and his father was already standing there dressed in a fur coat (ready to be taken away). My father did not have a mother, she, Frania from the Branytsky family, died when my father was 5 years old. We never heard anything more about my grandfather, and my father was always awaiting him.”

Record Memoirs of a Relative of Otaman Yukhym Tsiurupa from Rozkopantsi Village. The Story is Told by Nadiia Tsiurupa will first appear on Навколо Нас.

Bohuslav: a Report from the Expedition – the Yavorsky Family and Their Unique Photo Heritage

skrynka2012@ — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 15:26:11 +0000

November 30, 2023

“In this picture [together with the OUN member Hryhoriy Fastovets] is my father, Vsevolod Yavorsky,” commented Hanna Kharchenko, a resident of Bohuslav, under the post about our next expedition. She is now a psalmist at the Church of the Intercession of the Mother of God of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in Bohuslav, and before that, she worked as a kindergarten teacher near a cloth factory in Bohuslav.

We had arranged a meeting with Ms Hanna, and soon after we were in her cosy apartment in Bohuslav, looking together through old photographs and documents of the Yavorsky priestly family.

“My father was the son of an ‘enemy of the people’ – a priest. He was not allowed to work in one place for more than three or four months. His work record had forty-seven pages. My grandmother, Hanna Kyrylivna Tymoshenko, was also a psalmist and the daughter of a Medvyn psalmist, a teacher at a parish school. She also married a priest…

When the Soviets came to the village, my grandfather was told to renounce the church, and renounce God. They said, ‘You will have a job, you will have food, your child will not be an enemy of the people. And he said, “I will renounce the church, but I cannot renounce God”. To break him down, they took him naked around the village, poured all sorts of nasty things on him and threw feathers at him. And my father’s cousin, who was a sexton in that church, was taken with him. After this disgrace, this boy hanged himself. My grandfather was imprisoned with the whole family, and I have no idea how they survived with their child. They were imprisoned in 1928, and my father was born in 1924. They were there for nine months. Later they were released, but my grandfather Matviy Yavorsky was exiled…

My father was constantly anxious about us, his children. We were not allowed to bake Easter bread at home, we could not dye eggs, we could not tell a joke… People talked about Hryhoriy Fastovets, but secretly. He used to call him “Hrysha Fastovets”.

Before he was taken away to the front, my father received parcels from his father from different places with food, and stuff, but there was no return address on the parcels. And when he grew up, he found out that his father was in Donbas, he went to look for him there but did not succeed.”

Hanna Tymoshenko married for the second time, to her colleague, teacher Platon Trifonovych Salata, but he was shot in 1938, during the Great Terror.

Despite a terrible childhood and wartime youth and adolescence (Vsevolod Yavorsky served in the Red Army’s musical penalty battalion during WWII), he proved himself as a talented musician and photographer. He was a good painter and embroiderer.

“He played seven musical instruments. He learnt to play them all by himself on a paper keyboard. After the war, he graduated from the cultural education college and, at the age of 52, from the Kirovohrad Pedagogical Institute with honours,” says Hanna. “Vsevolod played in local bands and gave lessons in music and singing to schoolchildren. He also took photographs of exceptional beauty – portraits of family members, and landscapes of his native land, which graced the covers of “union publications”.

When we asked Hanna if she had any old photographs of her family, and she brought in four large albums and bundles of different photos. That’s when we realised we had found a real treasure. They contain photo chronicles of the city from the 1950s to the 1980s, pictures of scenic parts of Bohuslav, and artistic portraits of friends and family.

The self-taught artist not only mastered the art of photography and the peculiarities of working with various techniques but also created amazing images for photos himself. Vsevolod’s real muse was his gorgeous wife Antonina: he selected outfits for the photos, and designed and sewed various costumes and dresses himself.

When you look at the photos of this couple, you realise that freedom-loving attitude and rejection of the Soviet system remained with Vsevolod throughout his life. His family was the place where he created his own bright and colourful world in contrast to the imposed grey of the system.

These photos were left unpublished, in the Yavorsky family archive only, but they hold the history of our region and its people. And we would be honoured to share them with you. Immediately we came up with the idea of organising a personal exhibition of this extraordinary man. Now, with the support of the staff of the Museum of the History of Bohuslav Region, we are digitising this collection and looking for funding for it.

And Ms Hanna told us not only about the family history but also many fascinating facts about Bohuslav itself and its inhabitants. We recorded this story and will definitely publish it on our Facebook page and the YouTube channel, please stay tuned: https://www.youtube.com/@navkolonasua

Record Bohuslav: a Report from the Expedition – the Yavorsky Family and Their Unique Photo Heritage will first appear on Навколо Нас.

Expedition to Medvyn: Meeting the Local History Expert Petro Hohulia

skrynka2012@ — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 15:35:05 +0000

November 16, 2023

Since the mid-1980s, local historian Petro Hohulia (born in 1961) has been studying the liberation movement in the Medvyn and Bohuslav regions. He discovered the names of the participants of the Medvyn Uprising (1919-1922), as well as OUN members. In 2014, together with Roman Koval, he published the book Medvyn Uprising, followed in 2023 by the book Medvyn Uprising in Facts, Figures, and Memories, published together with his daughter Maryna Hohulia.

We visited Petro in Medvyn to interview him.

Petro Borysovych Hohulia is a native of Medvyn. His mother Maria Khtodosivna, maiden family name – Prylipko (1926-2005), survived the Holodomor. He repeatedly heard about this tragedy from his family:

“The Soviet authorities were more often considered robbers. No one from [our] Hohulia family died during the Holodomor, but they told us terrible things. My mother recalls the event when they, still kids, were walking to the centre of Medvyn, to the market, at the area of Denysiya, where the river flowed from the [Denysenko] pond and into the Myrskyi pond. She said they have seen the bodies of swollen from hunger children floating along it. They had died somewhere in the thickets, no one buried them, and it was raining heavily, so they were swept into that pond.”

Maria Khtodosivna worked on a collective farm from the age of 12. She survived the WWII and was repressed in 1946. She was accused, among other things, of having ties to the Banderites:

“My mother survived the war as a young girl. She told me that at first the Germans were friendly, shared food, and came to evening gatherings. They were not terrifying, as they are shown in soviet films… When the war ended, those who had worked in Germany returned home, and they saw that people in the West lived better than in the USSR and that Ukraine could live differently if it was liberated from slavery. So these guys went to the woods, they had trident caps… Then Marushevsky returned [to Medvyn], and there was a leader here, Smolyar, nicknamed “Zhuk” (The Beetle), who created a partisan unit. He was killed in 1946, I believe…

In total, there were four collective farms in Medvyn at that time. Although the heads of the collective farms, Kharchenko and Vasylenko had families, they did not stay at home overnight because they knew that they would be followed…

The rebel group believed in the idea of [restoring] Ukrainian statehood, they were preparing for the next [great] war, but the Americans did not attack the USSR, time passed, and these guys were captured. My mother and her friends were sentenced to eight years in prison because they helped those guys to harvest bread.

When she and her companions were in the Volodymyrska prison, and Ukrainian rebels sentenced to death were being held on the floor above, they would thread their clothes and use them to pass notes. Her friend Oksana Sarapuka mentioned that they wrote poems that made them cry.

They heard the doors opening at night and the boys being taken away. They [the mother and girls] were charged with armed robbery because while they were harvesting bread in the field, the boys were with them with weapons.”

Since 1989, Petro Borysovych Hohulia has been one of the organisers of memorial services for the residents of Medvyn who were executed by the bolsheviks in 1920.

“In 1989, we already understood that the collapse of that system was coming. We were already talking about the memorial service held under the Germans, the funeral service, the priests from Bohuslav, the autocephalous church, and the memorial dinner. We talked to Anatoliy Lystopad (deceased), Ivan Stepanchenko, and the Brazhnyky about the need to restore this tradition. Back then, there were Movement centres in Bohuslav and Medvyn, and there was a strong connection with the Kyiv regional organisation. At that time, almost all of the relatives who remembered those who died there were still alive. And it was no longer possible to create obstacles, although party members, commissars, and KGB officers were running around, recording, filming, and photographing everything. I remember that my mother-in-law Valentyna Ivanivna used to visit the retired head of the collective farm Vasylenko and say, “Valentyno, your Petro is wandering in the wrong places. Make sure he doesn’t run into a timber yard somewhere.” But even then, no one took any notice, because the processes were already underway.”

In the late 1990s, Hryhoriy Fastovets, one of the leaders of the OUN (b) in the Bohuslav region during World War II, visited Petro and his wife Nina in Bohuslav.

We recorded his reminiscences about this meeting, which will certainly be posted on our YouTube channel.

Record Expedition to Medvyn: Meeting the Local History Expert Petro Hohulia will first appear on Навколо Нас.

An Expedition Report: Memoirs of Mariia Rybalka from the Village of Chaiky

skrynka2012@ — Sun, 12 Nov 2023 15:40:20 +0000

November 12, 2023

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.

Record An Expedition Report: Memoirs of Mariia Rybalka from the Village of Chaiky will first appear on Навколо Нас.

An Expedition to the Village of Tunyky (Tuniki). Family Memories of Hryhoriy Fastovets, One of the Leaders of the OUN (b) in Bohuslavshchyna

skrynka2012@ — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 14:10:58 +0000

October 27, 2023

“When Hryhoriy returned from the camps, he was welcomed by the whole village. We have photos. He was so well-loved and respected. Many people joined resistance together with him, and he never betrayed anyone. They [the former members of an underground organization] lived a decent life until they were old,” recalls his sister Mariia about one of the leaders of the OUN (b) in the Bohuslavshchyna – Hryhoriy Fastovets.

We visited the village of Tunyky (Tuniki) on the outskirts of Luzana, near the insurgent’s family home, and recorded the memories of his nephew Volodymyr Hnidenko and sister Mariia Fastovets, and also had a chance to scan unique family photographs. Volodymyr also treated us to some of his homemade honey, as the Fastovets have been beekeeping for generations, and this craft has been inherited by Volodymyr from his uncle Hryhoriy.

The Fastovets were a hardworking peasant family with a good income, a large plot of land, a forest, a large apiary, a hefty house, and a large farm. Almost all of this was taken away during mass collectivisation, and grandfather Yosyp gave it all away voluntarily to save his life and that of his family. “They even dismantled the barn and moved it away,” says Mariia. During the Holodomor, Yosyp Fastovets managed to hide several bags of grain in the forest. At night, he would go to the forest, dig it up, take a portion, and bake bread at home. This bread was used to save themselves and to share with weak people who came to the house. During the Second World War, the family hid a Jewish woman from the Germans.

Yosyp’s son Hryhoriy Fastovets successfully graduated from school No. 2 in Bohuslav and was very interested in Ukrainian history and culture. During the Second World War, 18-year-old Hryhoriy joined the ranks of Ukrainian nationalists. With the Soviet front approaching, he travelled to the West.

“There was a period when he was unsure what to do in the underground, so he went to the West to seek advice. And, he was advised to leave Ukraine. He knew German very well since school years. Hryhoriy lived in Western Europe for a while, he visited Italy. But he loved Ukraine so much that he forged documents and returned in 1945. He was immediately drafted into the army and was exposed there. Apparently, he didn’t forge his documents too thoroughly…”

During the torture, he did not expose the members of the OUN underground network in the Kyiv region and managed to hide his leadership biography. In 1946, they sentenced him to a hard labour prison camp, where he was forced to perform inhumane labour at a logging site, and afterwards, he was exiled to Kazakhstan. In total, he spent 10 years in captivity. But even in those circumstances, Fastovets took care of his family and sent his mother financial assistance, as evidenced by the postal receipts she carefully kept.

After the camps, the man studied to become an engineer, settled in Kaniv, where he built the Kaniv hydroelectric power station as an engineer, and got married. Years of deprivation and distress did not erase any historical memory he held. Hryhoriy compiled lists of his fellow villagers who died of the Holodomor, as he himself survived this tragedy at the age of nine and lost his relatives. He wrote poetry and was fond of visiting the monument to Taras Shevchenko.

The fighter for Ukraine’s independence was rehabilitated almost four decades after the camps and exile. Volodymyr recalls: “They called Hryhoriy to Kyiv to Volodymyrska Street, where the State Security Service of Ukraine was located. He thought that they had found out something new about him and would imprison him again. I went with him and already bid him farewell, just in case. I was sitting there, waiting. Then he comes out and laughs, saying that he has been rehabilitated.”

In the mid-1990s, Hryhoriy Fastovets visited Bohuslav at the invitation of the Museum of the History of Bohuslav Region, the family of Petro Hohulia and Nina Levchenko, where he shared a lot about his participation in the OUN (b). We also met with Petro Hohulia, who remembers the conversation well, and recorded an interview with him about the nationalist movement in Bohuslav and Medvyn regions. We will release this material shortly.

Record An Expedition to the Village of Tunyky (Tuniki). Family Memories of Hryhoriy Fastovets, One of the Leaders of the OUN (b) in Bohuslavshchyna will first appear on Навколо Нас.

An Expedition to Teptiyivka. The Story of Tetiana Kravchenko and Petro Tsarenko

skrynka2012@ — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 22:06:46 +0000

October 25, 2023

It was Saturday, Indian summer, 25 degrees Celsius in October – a great opportunity to go on an ethnographic expedition to the villages of Bohuslavshchyna! Actually, that is what the team of the “Around Us. UA” NGO exactly did, making their way to two villages at once – Rozkopantsi and Teptiyivka.

In Rozkopantsi, we were to meet a man who plays many musical instruments. However, this time we were not lucky enough to meet him, though we managed to enjoy and film the beautiful countryside scenery of Bohuslavshchyna in autumn.

Therefore, without losing enthusiasm, our expedition team headed to Teptiyivka. There we had two people to visit: 92-year-old Tetiana Kravchenko and the son of Teptiyivka’s famous master spoonmaker Mykhailo, Petro Tsarenko.

First, we came to Tetiana’s house, where we also met her daughter, Olha. She was born in the village of Karandyntsi, and her parents worked on a collective farm. She tells us that during the Second World War, “under the Germans”, her house burned down. Tetiana had to work since she was 11 years old, and at that age, she joined the collective farm. Before the war, she managed to finish 3 grades, and afterwards, she finished the fourth grade at an evening school and then started working.

Even though Tetiana confessed she didn’t remember much, she told us a whole bunch of interesting stories and shared memories, as well as performed various songs: wedding songs, songs to bid farewell, and songs from the Christmas cycle.

The lady recalls that she learnt to sing from her father: “We were singing with my father, and it was during Lent, and my mother was scolding us. And my father would say, ‘Sing it out loud, daughter! ‘ And mom would scold us for singing.” The song remained with Tetiana through adulthood. After she got married, she moved to Teptiyivka and started working on a farm, and from there they went to Pyrohovo with the band to recreate a traditional wedding and sing Ukrainian folk songs. “I only saw the world when I travelled to Pyrohovo,” recalls the lady.

“Let’s sit down, Mummy, and have a weep, let’s sit down, Mummy, and have a weep. Let’s share all our good things. For you, sister, a barrel of sour milk. For me, mother, a chest of skirts. For you, mother, a spindle, for you, mother, a spindle. For me, mother, a towel. Wake up, mother, early on Saturday, wake up, mother, early on Saturday, wash my grey head. You won’t do it again, you won’t do it again, you won’t beat my white hands,” Tetiana shared this wedding song with us. She also told us about the traditions of wedding celebrations, about her own wedding, showed us some wedding photos, as well as a bridal shirt she had embroidered herself and a belt she had given us to keep and recreate. You can watch Tetiana’s story about wedding traditions by following this link.

Tetiana also shared her memories of the Christmas celebrations, telling us what they used to cook, how they used to sing carols, how they used to call ‘Frost’ to serve ‘him’ kutia (a ceremonial grain dish with sweet gravy), and how they used to honour their ancestors and commemorate their loved ones, who deceased. Kutia was made from rice and uzvar (stewed fruit drink). It was put in the sacred icon corner and covered with hay. Afterwards, they believed that the first hair found in that hay would hint at what cattle they should keep, it was a kind of sign. Tetiana also recalls how they used to ‘call’ their ancestors to dinner: “My mother would call them. She would say: “Come to taste kutia, take your whole family and join us for tasting kutia.” At night, we would leave everything we ate on the table, we didn’t clean it up, and everything stayed on the table until the morning. I remember, when my mother called, the candle would burn and flicker. I could see sticks on the wall as if someone had come. God only knows whether it’s true or not.” Watch more in our video report.

We also talked about the celebration of Easter and the remembrance days: “Earlier, there were no priests on the days of commemoration of the departed (Provody), so the women themselves were in charge, because the service was not allowed in the Soviet Union.” Interestingly, Karandyntsi also holds the commemoration day on the day of the Beheading of John the Baptist. At the same time, this tradition is not typical of other villages in Bohuslavshchyna: “We used to cook dinner there. Women used to go from house to house, gather food and cook it. Everyone would come, the whole village, lay down towels and sit on them having lunch at the cemetery. This was only in Karandyntsi. Every year on 11 September. Children were sitting separately, and the old people were sitting separately. They still keep the tradition there. There is no church, but they built a chapel.”

Tetiana also told us about the craft she was engaged in: spinning from hemp, which she sowed herself, and then weaving various products. She even had a special loom at home. We will reveal this and even more in the video, we are currently preparing for you.

Next, we went through the streets of autumnal Teptiyivka to visit Petro Tsarenko. He is the son of a spoonmaker. By the way, the village of Teptiyivka is a genuine centre of this craft.

Mykhailo Tsarenko (Petro’s father) was an Honoured Master of Folk Art of Ukraine, an outstanding artist of traditional folk art. Mykhailo made various wooden products, but first of all, spoons: Cossack, for women, and children, teaspoons, as well as ladles. His creations are kept in many museums in Ukraine and abroad in private collections. In addition, as his son and daughter-in-law recall, he also made toys for his grandchildren and furniture. Everything was made with hand tools! Although this was the master’s passion, he earned almost no money and worked in the village at a water pumping station. For refusing to work in the collective farm, they took away part of his garden, and the teachers and school children came to his house shouting out “Shame!”.

His neighbour taught him the craft of spoonmaking. And then Mykhailo himself, in addition to his own craftsmanship, taught this art to everyone willing to learn it, from all over Ukraine. During our expedition, Mykhailo’s son showed us how to make spoons, introduced us to his father’s tools and, together with his wife, showed us his father’s remaining creations, as most of them were given as gifts to people.

This visit finished our Saturday, and on Sunday we went to Tunyky and Medvyn. We will be sure to tell you more about that as well. Please wait for an impressive video about the craft of spoonmaking.

We would like to thank Liudmyla Rulenko, the village head, for her help in organising the meetings.

Record An Expedition to Teptiyivka. The Story of Tetiana Kravchenko and Petro Tsarenko will first appear on Навколо Нас.

Expedition to Medvyn. Recording Folklore from Liubov Fesenko, the Soloist of the Dzherelo Vocal Ensemble

skrynka2012@ — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 22:36:10 +0000

October 24, 2023

At the weekend, we went on an expedition to Medvyn, which is now the administrative centre of the territorial community and for a long time belonged to the Bohuslav district. There we recorded folklore from Liubov Fesenko, a soloist of the vocal ensemble Dzherelo.

Liubov was born in Medvyn, worked as a teacher in Kydanivka village for a significant part of her life, and was even the director of the local school. She learned folk songs and customs from her parents (her father played the harmonica well, and her mother, who came from Halychyna, knew plenty of ancient customs and rituals), as well as from the elderly people in Kydanivka. She performed for us the songs that were sung in her family, and also shared a whole arsenal of chants that were sung during a traditional Ukrainian wedding, including when she was getting married or was a bridesmaid. We would like to invite you to listen to the wedding songs performed by Liubov in our video report.

Record Expedition to Medvyn. Recording Folklore from Liubov Fesenko, the Soloist of the Dzherelo Vocal Ensemble will first appear on Навколо Нас.

Expedition to the Village of Moskalenky. Meeting with the Soloists of the “Berehynia” (“Hearth Mother”) Ensemble and Locals

skrynka2012@ — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 20:11:17 +0000

October 18, 2023

The songs that have been performed in Moskalenky since the dawn of time are now the heritage of our expeditionary work. We were kindly invited to Moskalenky village and hospitably met by the soloists of the “Berehynia” (“Hearth Mother”) ensemble (artistic director Olena Sukhodolska), who recorded for us lyrical, humorous folk songs and songs of the Christmas and New Year ritual cycle, including the unique Jordanian song “Oh, on the River, on the Jordan”. One of the soloists, Tetiana Burliuk, performed for us songs from the Poltava region, where she is originally from. We will make sure to share these recordings with you.

Although “Berehynia” was been established only a few years ago, its members have been enthusiastically collecting local folklore and performing at various art and charity events to help the Ukrainian army (including our charity event “Portal through the Centuries: Old-World Bohuslav”).

The hostesses of the local club set up a special ethnographic photo zone in the lobby, which is also a place where camouflage nets are made for our warriors. We also learned about traditional dishes with local flavours: pumpkin pies, varenyky, sausages, pickles, fried mushrooms, and potatoes following a special recipe.

A real highlight was the meeting with residents: members of the “Krayany” ensemble Uliana Vorona (94 y.o.) and Halyna Khyzhniak (89 y.o.). Owing to them, the Moskalenky version of “Steam Engine”, “There’s a Birch Tree in the Field, There’s a Curly Birch Tree in the Field”, and “Oh, a Cuckoo Was Flying Over a Steep Mountain” are now in our ethnographic collection and you are welcome to listen to them via the links directly on our website.

On our way back to Bohuslav, we also visited Lidiya Tomashevska in Moskalenky village. She told us the story of her family, showed us embroidered shirts made by her mother, a necklace, an authentic men’s wedding belt, and picturesque photos of a mid-twentieth century Moskalenky village wedding. Lidiya herself inherited her mother’s talent as a craftswoman and now she is engaged in folk-style jewellery-making. The filming took place near the Tomashevsky family’s preserved hut-mazanka.

We would like to kindly remind you that this fall we are dedicating to collecting Ukrainian folklore, family stories, ancient household items, and embroidery samples in the Bohuslav and Medvyn regions. We aim to save from oblivion what is under the risk of disappearing with the passing of generations, the history that makes us Ukrainians.

Record Expedition to the Village of Moskalenky. Meeting with the Soloists of the “Berehynia” (“Hearth Mother”) Ensemble and Locals will first appear on Навколо Нас.