Bukovyna

By Walter Kish

Many years ago, I was married in a little Orthodox Church in Oshawa that, though officially known as St. Mary’s, was more popularly called the “Bukovynian Church”, after the origins of most of its parishioners.  My wife’s grandmother came from a town named Horodenka that sat near the traditional though indistinct border between the Bukovynian and Hutsul communities of Western Ukraine.  Obviously, she considered herself Bukovynian, and in conjunction with numerous other early immigrants that came from that same corner of Ukraine, they tended to create tight-knit communities and parishes in the Diaspora. It was particularly fitting that we were married in that little Orthodox church that my wife’s grandfather personally helped build.

Bukovyna is an area of some ten thousand square kilometres that straddles the border between Ukraine and Romania along the northern slopes and adjoining plains of the Carpathian Mountains.  Today, it is more commonly known as Chernivtsi Oblast, though historically this corresponds only to Northern Bukovyna, with Southern Bukovyna now forming Suceava County in Romania.  World War II and the onset of the Cold War irretrievably divided this principality that was an interesting polyglot of Ukrainians, Romanians, Poles, Jews, Germans and Hungarians.  Today, Ukrainians make up approximately 75% of the population of Chernivtsi Oblast, Romanians 20% and others 5%.  Southern Bukovyna in contrast has become much more mono-cultural with Romanians comprising 98% of the population. 

The current population of Chernivtsi Oblast sits at just under one million people, though for most of its history it was very sparsely populated – as late as 1775 its population stood at only some 75,000.  The Austrians strongly encouraged settlement in the area, and by 1900 the population had grown to about 800,000, with a majority of the influx being Ukrainians, though significant numbers of Germans, Jews, Armenians and Hungarians also settled here.  The province’s capital city of Chernivtsi, known as Czernowitz by the Austrians, became a thriving cultural and commercial centre, known variously as Little Vienna or Jerusalem on the Prut.

In ancient times, the area was a centre of the well known Trypillian culture. Two thousand years ago, the area formed one of the border outpost provinces of the Roman Empire known as Dacia.  Subsequent to the collapse of the Roman Empire, the area was overrun at various times by the Goths, Huns and Avars, and it was only during the time of the Kyivan Rus Empire that Slavic tribes began settling in the area, and for a time it was part of the Principality of Halych-Volynia.  During the fourteenth century, it coalesced into the Principality or Kingdom of Moldova, also known as Wallachia. At various times, it came under the control of Hungarians, Tatars, Turks and Poles.  From the late eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Up until this time, the majority population of the area had been Romanian, but under the Austrians, Ukrainians were encouraged to settle there until by 1900 they formed the majority. 

Between 1890 and 1930, due to the poor economic prospects and political instability of the area, large numbers of Ukrainian Bukovynians emigrated to Canada and the U.S, including my wife’s grandparents.  During a recent visit to Chernivtsi, I stumbled across a faded but still legible sign on an old building under renovation, promoting immigration services to Canada.

The name Bukovyna itself comes from the Ukrainian word for the beech tree, buk, and reflects the fact that in olden times, the area was known for its vast beech tree forests.  In contrast to most of the rest of Ukraine, Bukovyna still contains vast tracts of forest, covering some 40% of its territory.  Needless to say, lumbering and woodworking are a large part of the local economy.  Agriculture is also prominent, while the nearby Carpathian Mountains are a rich source of iron, copper, manganese, lead and silver.

Culturally, Bukovynians are in most respects Ukrainian, though obviously because of history one can see Romanian, Hungarian and German influences in the language, music, arts and folk traditions. A number of prominent Ukrainians were either born or lived in Bukovyna, including Olha Kobylyanska, Stepan Smal-Stocki, Ivan Franko and Leonid Krawchuk, the first President of Ukraine.  Bukovyna is a small but nonetheless rich and distinctive piece of the rich mosaic that constitutes the Ukrainian people.