Exactly 76 years ago, 140,575 Polish citizens of Rusyn and Ukrainian ethnic descent were forcedly resettled from their ethnic territories in south-eastern Poland to the ‘Returned Lands’, or ‘German Poland’ (the lands transferred from Germany to Poland according to the decisions taken at the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences in 1945), or to the USSR. According to Polish authors, over 100,000 of them were Lemkos. Although Lemkos have their own organizations, a handful of settlements created by returnees to Lemkovyna, and a wealth of interesting history, most Subcarpathian Rusyns know very little, if anything about them.
This goes with most of the population of Poland too, with there being only a handful of examples that aim to enlighten the broader public. One such work is by Andrzej Karczmarzewski, a Polish ethnographer and the author of the richly illustrated book Świat Łemków (The Lemkos’ World). I recently bought this book while in Warsaw and was amazed by its overall amount of content. His ethnographic travelogue encompasses nearly all historical, cultural, and religious aspects of the (nearly lost) life of Polish Lemkos:
– The history of the Lemkos’ settling in the region historically known as Łemkowszczyzna or Lemkovyna (Lemko Land);
– Contacts with other sub-ethnic groups, especially the Boikos, as well as interrelations between different groups of the Lemkos;
– The origin of the term Lemko;
– Everyday life – crop and livestock farming, non-agricultural occupations, including long ago abandoned ones (like the manufacture of wooden utensils, especially ladles, and spoons – until now, this is the major occupation of the Volokhy (Wallachians), a peculiar Romanian-speaking community living in Western Transcarpathia, far from the main Romanian ethnic massif; wood carving; wild-hive beekeeping; stonemasonry; and even folk medicine and sorcery-related to it, with the preparation of ointments from crude oil found in the Carpathians);
– Folk clothing;
– House-building and residential interiors;
– Folk beliefs and superstitions;
– Heroic outlaws (local ‘Robin Hoods’ who robbed the well-off and gave money to the poor;
– Ritual calendar (religious feasts, baptisms, weddings, funerals, etc.) and the role of the Greek Catholic and the Orthodox Churches in the Lemkos’ lives.
A particular set of topics that were covered were by far the most interesting to me, so I will cover them here. According to a hypothesis supported by many Polish historians, there were two independents waves of colonization of the Lemko Land: at first, as back as in the 13th century, Wallachian nomadic shepherds came to the Carpathians from Maramorosh/Máramaros and Moldova (a reference to the so-called ‘Wallachian colonization of the Carpathian Mountains’) – with their original origins being from the southern Balkans. The later migration was of Ruthenian settlers who arrived in the 15th – 16th centuries from what had formerly been South-Western Rus. This is somewhat disputed as many things regarding our origins are. Some historians believe this process of migration by both groups occurred at the same time, while others follow the theory from above.
Regardless, both groups crossed the watershed ranges and settled along both sides of the Carpathians. The Wallachians would soon be assimilated due to their likely smaller numbers and Orthodox background. Part of the Wallachians however, getting mixed with Poles and Slovaks, helped to form the ethnogenesis of the Gorals/Carpathian Highlanders, a peculiar West Slavonic sub-ethnos living until now on both sides of the Polish-Slovakian border.
Another fascinating thing to realize is that the Lemkos themselves were not a homogeneous ethnic community. They were divided into three larger groups that differed significantly from one another: the Western (Beskid Krynicki, and the banks of the Biała River), the Central (from the Biała River to Jasiołka), and the Eastern (from Jasiołka to Wielki Dział) groups, which, in their turn, were further divided into smaller groups, some of which included just one or two villages. Unlike other Rusyn vernaculars, the Lemko language has borrowed numerous Polish linguistic traits, like the stress on the penultimate syllable (a feature of most of the Pryashiv and even Pannonian Rusyn vernaculars too), but the further eastward the fewer Polonisms are found in the local Lemko patois.
As for the very word Lemko, it had originated along the Lemko – Boiko (another East Slavonic sub-ethnos of the Carpathians, living to the east from Lemkos) borderline, and spread in Galicia only in the 1930s. Andrzej Karczmarzewski claims that this ethnonym had hardly been used among Lemkos before the interwar score of years, and was of more political than ethnographic character: it was most popular in the western areas of Lemkovyna, where the local self-identity was far different than the residents of Eastern Galicia. The very word Lemko was introduced into the official lexicon by the Polish ethnographer J. Czapowicz in 1829, though not to identify the Polish (then Austrian) Lemkos. He divided the Hungarian Ruthenians (i.e. Rusyns living in what is now East Slovakia and Ukraine’s Transcarpathian region) into Lemaks (for the areas where Rusyns used the word lem, originating from the Slovak len = only) and Lyshaks (for the areas where Rusyns used the word lysh, originating from the Ukrainian word with the same meaning).
There were a bunch of other names for the smaller Lemko groups: Wengriny (‘Hungarians’, because they wore the same clothing as Slovaks who, in their turn, lived in Felvidék = Upper Hungary, and, as tobacco smugglers, they often interfered with the Hungarian customs authorities), Świcaki, Torokary, Pupkary, Łosie (these would say: “We are not Lemkos, we come from Sweden,” referring to their half-legendary pedigree; they were fair-haired, taller and richer than other Lemkos), Barny (from barnas, a black bull, which in its turn may have originated from Hungarian barna = brown), Cybuszary (culturally the least developed part of the Lemkos), Krajniacy (from Krajna – the old administrative unit encompassing several villages settled by the Wallachian law; until now, this term is found in many Slavonic lands), Korolewcy, etc.
These are just a few of the many interesting topics that the book contains. A last one that I would like to end on stands out as something of a contradiction from our usual perception, and might give a better insight into the true values of our people from a previous generation.
“Lemkos paid much attention to holding religious feasts, but weekly Sunday Services were treated as something ‘not compulsory and unimportant’.” Nonetheless, religion did play an important role in the spiritual life of Lemkos, and a church, usually erected in the centre of a village, often on some elevation, and encircled with a cemetery, constituted the centre of that life.