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On Christmas Eve in Ukraine, the Church Is Chilly (or Is It?)
I celebrated Christmas with relatives in the village of Shutromynsti. There were many courses, multiple toasts, piercing memories and joyful singing.
The 12 of us around the kitchen table said our prayers individually in hushed tones.
Michael Ziatyk, the 73-year-old head of the household, dipped his spoon into the large bowl of wheat porridge at the center of the table and twice swept it from side to side in the sign of the cross, then ate a spoonful mixed with nuts, poppy seeds and honey. In turn, we also dipped our spoons and ate, a family communion of sorts.
This meal marked the beginning of the second of three “holy suppers’’ my wife and I shared with relatives on Christmas Eve, on Jan. 6 of this year, in the small Ukrainian village of Shutromynsti. (Ukrainians who are Greek Catholic and Eastern Orthodox usually celebrate Christmas on Jan. 7 because they follow the old Julian calendar as opposed to the newer Gregorian calendar.)
Each meal consisted of 12 vegetarian dishes ranging from salads and golubsi, rice and nuts stuffed in rolled cabbage leaves, to slices of herring and varenyky, dumplings filled with potato or cabbage.
My relatives believe souls of the dead visit on Christmas Eve, the reason I was urged to nibble on a garlic clove to ward off any spirits who might be evil. Garlic cloves also were tucked beneath the corners of the tablecloth for the same purpose. Some food is left out overnight for the good souls — much like treats for Santa Claus in America. Food from the meal also is shared with the family’s pigs and cows because they provide sustenance during the year.
At least three toasts were made during each meal: to the three days of Christmas; to parents, family and friends; and to love, the last usually made while standing. Our shot glasses were filled with homemade nonalcoholic wine, Italian brandy and what a translator called “Lemko Fire,’’ their name for vodka they distilled from potatoes and sugar in the corner of a bedroom.
Since my relatives are Greek Catholic we could have attended a one-hour Christmas Eve mass. But my second cousin Olena Ziatyk, 76, who walks with a cane, opted for the village’s other church, fittingly named St. Nicholas. St. Nicholas also is the patron saint of the village. The three-and-a-half hour Ukrainian Orthodox Divine Liturgy, she said, would allow her time to meditate about her life, her soul.
The opportunity to meet and spend the holiday with Olena, her two brothers and their extended families fulfilled a quest that began years ago when I found a packet of letters and photographs that belonged to my late mother.
A sister of Olena’s grandfather, my mother Eva Stricharchuk ((maiden name, Ziatyk), had emigrated as a child to the United States in 1910. The oldest letters date to 1939. The most recent, a Christmas greeting from Olena in the early 1960s, asked my mother to visit one of Ukraine’s larger cities. “Maybe you’ll come so that we will come and see you,’’ she wrote in Ukrainian. My mom never made the trip.
But about a year and a half ago my wife, Cheryl L. Reed, won a Fulbright scholarship to teach at Kiev-Mohyla National Academy. In September 2016 we moved to Kiev and my roots adventure began in earnest.
Last November, after a five-hour train ride to western Ukraine, where I met up with a translator who drove us another two hours in his car, we pulled into Olena’s village for the first time — after several stops to allow women herding cows to cross the main road. There is no commercial area, just a community center that occasionally opens for dances. Like others in the village, Olena’s family tends to plots of land where they raise potatoes and other vegetables.
After hugs and three kisses on our cheeks Olena showed us her chickens and a shed where she kept a cow and four pigs, including one destined to be slaughtered for Christmas dinner. The main house, separate from a building where food is prepared for the family and the animals, is among a dozen in the village of 400 people that have indoor plumbing and Wi-Fi.
One of our first stops was the village cemetery where I learned I was named after my mother’s brother and Olena’s grandfather, a person I had never heard of before. As we stood at the rickety green wooden cross that marked his grave I wondered why my mother had never told me about Gregory Ziatyk or two other brothers, one who died in the 1940s and another who had sailed to the United States but immediately returned to Ukraine and died three days later.
I also learned why the Ziatyks were living in the Ternopil oblast when the village listed on my mother’s baptism record was some 225 miles to the west, in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains in what had been the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Olena began to cry as she explained how the Soviets at the end of World War II forced people from their village of Soyinka into cattle cars and shipped them to Ukraine while their homeland was annexed to Poland. The Ziatyks were among 100,000 Lemkos, an ethnic minority, scattered about Ukraine as part of the forced-relocation program known as Operation Vistula. In 1947 another 50,000 Lemkos were settled throughout Poland.
“If you didn’t want to leave they threatened to burn you in your house,’’ said Olena, who was six years old when her family was moved. The homes of 250 people who lived in Solinka were set ablaze. One family member claimed he was Polish in the hope he would be allowed to stay. He was tied to the tail of a horse and dragged through the village, Olena said. Paralyzed by his injuries, he died five years ago.
The Ziatyks had left behind 10 hectares of land (roughly 25 acres) and a sizable house, according to a document Olena showed me. They also lost most of their possessions and animals, except for one horse, she said.
The house the Soviets assigned them, long since replaced, had previously been the home of two Jewish brothers and their families. They were among nearly a dozen Jews from the village who were murdered by Nazis. Olena told the story of the village’s last Jew, a 10-year-old boy who kissed the boots of Nazi soldiers and pleaded to be spared. “They shot him anyway,’’ she said.
At 14, Olena began working at the nearby kolkhoz, a Soviet collective farm, raising beets and tobacco, a job that spanned more than 40 years — until the fall of the Soviet Union.
After I walked through the kolkhoz’s dilapidated buildings and a church where the Soviets stored fertilizers and chemicals I asked Olena what her life was like. Some days she said she got by on little more than two and a half hours of sleep and earned as little as 18 cents a day, enough for bread. She said she once worked an entire summer for which her father received a shirt.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, she said, so too did the village’s economy, as people like Olena who depended on the state lost their jobs. In rural Ukraine employment has never recovered. People routinely take jobs in other countries.
Olena’s son-in-law, a grandson and another villager, for example, make their living driving workers to and from Warsaw, a trip that can take up to 12 hours one way. Other family members have lived and worked in Italy, England and the United States. Some only return only once or twice a year. Olena, who was married briefly and resumed using her maiden name, lives on a government pension of about $40 a month, or roughly one-fifth the average Ukrainian worker’s monthly earnings.
In the 1950s and 1960s I remember tagging along with my mother to send packages of clothing to the Ziatyks. My mother told me she always sent three of each item, suspecting the packages would be pilfered as they moved through customs.
Such packages, Olena said, were cherished because they contained sweaters, mittens and scarves; thousands were sent from the United States. Marie Klimchak, the curator at the Ukrainian National Museum in Chicago, said scarves and shawls were routinely sent because they were practical, but also could be used as gifts or sold. In effect, clothing and spools of thread acted as a form of currency because money could not be sent through the mail.
The packages also made recipients targets for harassment because the Soviets did not want Americans knowing how dire life was behind the Iron Curtain. At one point Soviet agents demanded that Olena sign a document declaring she no longer wanted the packages. Doing so would have meant future packages would have been returned, marked addressee unknown.
Olena declined.
“I told them if I signed my name my father would kill me,” she said. They apparently believed her. Her father had a reputation for being fearless — threatening to use his ax to chop the head off a government official who demanded paperwork authorizing the purchase of materials the family used to build their house. During World War II he had suffered gunshot wounds to an arm and leg while serving as a soldier in the Soviet army.
After our last Christmas Eve meal we rested for two hours, then bundled up for the 11 p.m. church service.
The wind stung our faces — the temperature was barely above 1 degree — as we walked through crunchy snow to the church, built around 1800 by an Austrian miller for whom the village is named.
Parishioners stood shoulder to shoulder in the tiny church. Some held candles they lighted and snuffed out and lighted again during the service. A few people knelt from time to time, and some, mostly small children and the very elderly, sat on narrow benches along the walls.
In my thick parka and scarf, my hands inside double pairs of gloves in my pockets, I tried to ignore the cold by focusing on the blinking red and blue Christmas lights adorning the altar, the icons of saints and the joyful singing. Many of the women and girls at the front of the church wore bright red and green scarves and sang as passionately and loudly as the choir in the loft above us.
When the priest moved to the center of the church, not far from where I stood, I could see his breath as he recited the liturgy. After about an hour and a half, my wife tugged on my coat, the signal to leave. We were both chilled to the bone.
At the Christmas meal the following day meat dishes such as holodets, pork or chicken embedded in gelatin; blood sausage and kielbasa; and smoked pork sausages were served along with the same fare as the night before. Nearly everyone remarked about how warm the church had been the night before.
I could see the priest’s breath, I replied.
No, they said, it was warm.
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