Walter Kish

Not far from the Polish border northwest of Lviv stands the picturesque village of Potelych. It’s history goes back many centuries, with the earliest mentions in church and official records dating to the early 13th century. Over the first few centuries of its existence, it prospered and grew rapidly, attaining the distinction of being granted "Magdeburg Law" status in 1498, giving it a fair degree of local political autonomy.

It reached its zenith in the 16th and 17th centuries, when it was a bustling regional center, renowned in particular for its pottery. An official census in 1578 recorded, among other things, that the town had no less than 50 potters, 27 bakers, 19 boot makers, 14 blacksmiths, 12 brewers, 10 butchers, 8 weavers, 7 general merchants and 6 furriers. Sometime in the early 16th century, the prosperous villagers built the magnificent wooden Church of The Holy Spirit (Tserkva sv Dukha) halfway up a beautiful, tree-covered hill overlooking the village. It was built in traditional Boiko style and its interior walls were covered in the seventeenth century with rich tempera paintings that liberally mixed biblical themes with Ukrainian history and folklore. The church exists to this day and remains in very good condition, though services are only held in it on very special holidays and celebrations.

Potelych is the "selo" where my mother’s family comes from, and I have been fortunate enough to visit it many times in the past decade. I have climbed to the top of that hill where the Church of the Holy Spirit stands, and have spent many pleasant hours surveying the pastoral scene below. From the hilltop, one has a magnificent view of the peaceful, rustic village below as well as the rich gently rolling countryside beyond. From those heights, the land below is a picturesque quilt of gardens, fields, woodlands and ponds. A modest little river winds its way through the "selo", providing both shelter and recreation to the village’s abundant population of free-range geese and ducks.

Next to the old wooden church, along the hill’s steep slopes is the cemetery, where many generations of my family lie buried. This is not your typical North American "Forest Lawn" cemetery, with finely manicured lawns and rows of relatively uniform headstones. This is a jumble of monuments and crosses, some stone, some iron, some of decaying wood. The place is overgrown with a riotous mixture of wild and planted flowers, shrubs, grasses and weeds. It is in a way appropriate though ironic, that in this final resting ground for the dead, there is such an abundance of life-affirming vegetation.

Interestingly enough, there is a cemetery on the outskirts of town that we would find more traditional and familiar. There, the fenced-in grounds are kept clean and weed-free, the grass is always neatly trimmed, and where the stones and crosses stand in a dignified silence amidst the modestly verdant surroundings. It is known as the "German" cemetery. Here lie buried thousands of German soldiers that were killed during the many battles that were fought in the area during the Second World War. The German Government bought this piece of land, built the cemetery and pays for its continued upkeep. Potelych, like many towns and villages throughout Ukraine, has been both blessed and cursed with too much history.

It is this, more than anything else, that stays with me from my visits to Potelych – the spiritual weight of all that history. For most of us Canadians, our roots here seldom go back more than a century. Sitting there atop that hill in Potelych, I had the overwhelming feeling that for countless generations back, one of my distant ancestors had sat probably on that same spot, and like myself marveled at the beauty of the countryside below. In all likelihood another had also watched from these heights in the terrible year of 1502, when the Tatars stormed through the village, killing and destroying everything in their path. No doubt, one had peered down to watch some decades after, as the wooden church took shape along its once again more peaceful slopes. And, in 1648, they undoubtedly marveled at the sight of Bohdan Khmelnytsky who, during the uprising that saw the creation of the free Cossak state, came through Potelych and made a stop to pray in this same little wooden church.

We are all the sum of the personal histories of our ancestors, and places like Potelych are our own personal living museums. They are places we should honour and cherish.