All Things Lemko

By Walter Kish

At the recent Toronto Ukrainian Festival at Harbourfront, I met up with my favourite Lemko, the well known artist and iconographer Pavlo Lopata.  Aside from his artistic endeavours, he is well know for his activism and organizational efforts in the local Lemko community which steadfastly maintains its distinct identity in a way that other Ukrainian regional ethnic groups such as the Boykos, Hutsuls and Bukovinians have not been able to do. 

The chance meeting reminded me that I am half Lemko myself, something I was not aware of for most of my upbringing.  Lemkos, also known as Rusyns or Rusnaks, are a distinct ethnic group (some would say nationality) that used to inhabit the area in the northwestern Carpathian Mountains that currently encompasses the southeastern corner of Poland, Eastern Slovakia, and the border area immediately west of Lviv.  One should note that I said “used to” since in the wake of the two world wars and Soviet geopolitics in the twentieth century, most Lemkos were forcibly displaced – many to other areas in Ukraine and Poland.  This compounded the large emigration of Lemkos to North America that had been going on since the late 1800’s.  The only large homogenous group of Lemkos still left in their original territories can be found in the Presov region of Eastern Slovakia

My mother’s village of Devyatyr was one victim of this unfortunate displacement.  What’s left of the ancestral village of Devyatyr now lies inside of Poland, its inhabitants forced to move inside the Soviet borders when the Communists took over Western Ukraine and arbitrarily created new frontiers.  A new Devyatyr was built several kilometres to the east of the barbed wire fence that marked the start of the “people’s paradise” known as the Soviet Union.

It is estimated that of the pre-WWII population of 140,000 Lemkos that lived in the Polish part of Lemkivshchyna, some 90,000 were “resettled” into Soviet Ukraine, while the Polish Operation Wisla scattered another 35,000 or so throughout Northern and Western Poland.  Currently only 10,000 to 15,000 Lemkos remain in what used to be their home for six centuries

There are many distinctive aspects of Lemko culture, not the least of which is language.  Although most of the grammar and vocabulary are very similar to standard Ukrainian, there are a number of recognizable variations and differences.  Among the more obvious, is the tendency to pronounce the “s” sound as “sh”, and dispensing with the softening of consonants indicated by the soft sign () in standard Ukrainian. 

Because of the geography, it is also not surprising that there have been many words borrowed from the neighbouring Poles, Slovaks and Hungarians.   There are also many unique regional words - some unique to specific villages.  For instance, depending on which selo you came from, potatoes can be bandurky, gruli, komperi, or mandeburky.

In later life, when I finally had the opportunity to travel through most of Ukraine, I found out that a lot of the words and phrases I had learned from my mother were not standard Ukrainian, but were in fact part of the Lemko lexicon.  One interesting example, if I can return to my Lemko friend mentioned at the start of this column, is the word for shovel.  In standard Ukraine it translates as lopata, however the Lemko word I learned for shovel as a kid was shuflya.  As a true Lemko, Pavlo Lopata should be calling himself Pavlo Shuflya!

Other examples of Lemko words (with standard Ukrainian equivalent in brackets) are: antrament for ink (chornylo), baika for story (kazka), buben for drum (baraban), vargy for lips (usta), hanba for shame (styd), harbata for tea (chai), hoden for “I can” (mozhu), hulyaty for to dance, zato for because (tomu), zvizda for star (zirka), kelishok for shotglass (charka), kohut for rooster (piven), lem for but (ale), lipshe for better (krashche), motyka for hoe (sapa), motuz for rope (shnur), rover for bicycle (velosyped), solonyna for lard (salo), spodni for trousers (shtany), studnya for well (krynytsya), fayka for tobacco pipe (liulka), fest for strongly (sylno), shparuvaty for save (oshchadyty), and yapko for apple (yabluko).  I should note that the above examples are not exclusively Lemko, as cross-pollination has seen them enter into common usage in many other areas of Western Ukraine or Halychyna.

It is commendable that despite their difficult and troubled history, the Lemkos still manage to proudly hang on to their distinctive identity and culture wherever fate may have cast them.