by Tim Cope
From here onward to Hungary I could expect more nationalist sentiment, and in the main I was sympathetic to western Ukrainians who were struggling to salvage their cultural identity. Most interesting for me, however, was that this cultural divide seemed broadly reminiscent of the fractious Slavic princedoms the Mongols had so famously exploited during their invasion all those centuries ago. Many Russians and Ukrainians had lamented to me that “if only” the Slavs could have unified, then the Mongols never would had advanced to Europe. Little, it seemed, had changed.
The first of many tours of Bilche Zolote got under way with typical gusto. In the “first-class” sanatorium I was ordered to strip off and enter a special pine-oil bath. Yaroslav stood over me cuddling one of the sanatorium’s nurses, to whom Yaroslav had apparently lost his virginity in his youth. “That was thirty-seven years ago!” she yelped as Yaroslav moved to bury his face in her bosom. This was just one example of the mayor’s rather lewd behavior, which went as far as climbing up a stone statue of an undressed woman and posing with his tongue caressing a giant nipple. On several occasions he told me that if I needed a girl, I only had to whisper the word.
Among the multiple other tours, one of the more memorable was riding through the countryside in a traditional horse wagon squeezed between two teenage girls dressed in traditional outfits. Yaroslav sat back, commanding the girls to sing. Between songs he told elaborate tales of his kingdom. The driver, who had been convinced to drag out his old horse and cart for the occasion, swore monotonously.
It was on the third evening that things began to spiral out of control. I was invited for dinner with the principal of the high school, and Yaroslav was adamant the horses remain grazing after dark on the soccer oval. “Don’t worry! Nothing can happen in this town, it is mine! I will order the caretaker to guard the horses while we are gone!” But when we returned around midnight the caretaker was passed out, snoring. Ogonyok and Kok were gone.
In that moment Yaroslav’s authority disintegrated. You could see a growing look of terror as it dawned on him that his grand PR plans were fast unraveling—half of the country’s media were due to turn up for a press conference in the morning, and what they would get was a story about horse thievery!
As panic spread through us all, Yaroslav, the principal, and her husband took off in three different directions. The security guard was resigned. “What’s the point? It’s common knowledge that the horse will be at a meat factory by morning. You will never find them,” he said.
I raced around blindly on Taskonir trying to pick up the scent, but after two hours all seemed lost … that was, until the sheriff phoned to report the sighting of a local leading two horses out of town. I later learned this person was an orphan with a history of crime who was currently on parole; being caught would have meant a long jail sentence. Word was that the sheriff managed to find him and convince him to return the horses, or at least that was what we came to believe, because at about 1:00 A.M. a mysterious figure came running through the street with my horses before letting them go and vanishing into the night.
Come the press conference I was itching to wrest control of my journey back from Yaroslav. After I finished giving interviews, there was one last event—the school concert. The poor principal, who had been told only the day before about the impending extravaganza, scrambled to get the kids in traditional dress. When the time came, Yaroslav changed into traditional clothes too and addressed the crowd with an exuberant speech. During the group photo, he leaped from the steps at the school entrance onto an unsuspecting Taskonir and paraded for the TV cameras with a fist punching into the sky.
In the afternoon I dug out my gear and attempted to ride off. It wasn’t going to be that easy, though. On the way out I was serenaded by the local choir and offered vodka and food, and by the time I got going it was almost dark. I made it as far as a lake and thought I was in the clear—until 3:00 A.M., when there came shouting. I wearily zipped open the tent, and there in the pouring rain, with his leather jacket and “I Love Ukraine” T-shirt soaked through, was Yaroslav.
“It’s such a beautiful place here, isn’t it? I was so worried they would steal your horses! I came to protect you!” He had walked on foot for 10 km to reach me, and now looked in with crazed drunken eyes and dangled a pint-sized fish in my face. “Come and see the rest of my catch and I will make us fish soup! Only I’m wet—can I borrow a coat?”
I gave him my rain jacket and went back to sleep, but no sooner had I drifted off than I was woken by a bloodcurdling noise. Not far away under a little tarp shelter I discovered Yaroslav. He lay on the ground, covered in mud, curled up with his pet dog. The two of them had their noses pointed skyward and were howling a duet.
“Listen, Tim! This Bilche Zolote dog can sing! Where is your video camera?”
With what little strength I had left I rode out, and even when the howling faded I didn’t look back.
A week from Bilche Zolote I pulled into camp on the banks of the river Prut near the city of Kolomiya. The grass was long, the evening dry and dusty; the tender spring foliage on the trees fluttered in the breeze.
The last few days had felt like more of a recovery from Yaroslav than from Dad’s passing, but either way the horses, Tigon, and I were rejuvenated. I felt ready to commit myself to the task at hand. As I gazed to the western horizon, there, embroiled in dark stormy clouds, was my first glimpse of the Carpathian Mountains.
23
AMONG THE HUTSULS
“Where there is a Hutsul, there you will find a horse.”
Vincenz Stanislaw, 1936
On the High Uplands: Sagas, Songs,
Tales and Legends of the Carpathians
Beyond the village of Sheshory the mountains closed in and the sky shrank to a strip. I followed a river in a deep, narrow valley where steep slopes barbed with spiny spruce rose around my little caravan. In the late afternoon dark gray clouds avalanched from unseen peaks, flooding the valley and blotting out the sun. Thunder cracked, a gust of cold air hurtled past us, and a heavy rain tore down.
In the evening the sun made a fleeting reappearance, backlighting a bedraggled babushka who hobbled along the roadside carrying a sack of hand-cut grass on her back. She looked up at me with great concern.
“Are you off to the polonina?” She put her hand on her heart. “You are brave! May God be with you!”
The following morning I was no wiser as to what the word polonina meant—that would come later—but I was beginning to appreciate the well wishes. At the head of the valley in the village of Shepit, the road gave way to ridges and peaks with no obvious way through. I could either take a three-day detour back the way I had come and ride on via a main road, or I could try my luck at finding a path over the top.
Opting for the latter, I dismounted and set off up a slope that soon became so steep I could almost lean on it. With each step my panicked lungs sucked for air. Behind, the horses heaved and moaned, sweat dribbling down from the back of their ears, hooves slipping as rocks were dislodged and went clattering down.
Higher up I found a chute used by timber workers for sending logs down from the forest. The rains had turned it into a muddy trench, and after many falls I reached a grassy ledge and collapsed at the hooves of my horses. At first I lay clutching the lead ropes, feeling my eyeballs throb in time with my chest, but as my heart rate subsided I lifted my sights, and the difficulties faded. To the east, back the way we had come, the mountainside dropped away to the foothills of the Carpathians. Lined up like ocean swells were row upon row of forested ridges. The sky was clear, and my eyes floated effortlessly over the same crests and troughs through which we had struggled in recent days. Eventually my focus settled on the horizon where the land tapered off into steppe.
Two and a half years earlier I had perched on a similar slope in the Altai of eastern Kazakhstan and gazed over the steppe from the opposite direction. From such a height the modern age of machines, highways, and state borders had melted into ins
ignificance. The Eurasian steppe had beckoned as a fenceless space that carried on unbroken for a vast distance to the Carpathians. I had visualized it as one giant kingdom, guarded in the east by the Altai and in the west by the Carpathians, beyond each of which lay the respective outposts of Mongolia and Hungary.
Around 7,250 km later, Ogonyok and Taskonir, who had shared that moment with me, were still here, and none of my enchantment from those early days had worn off. Only now, looking to the horizon, what had been an unknown I could recount in vivid detail. When I closed my eyes I could visualize every camp, every lunch stop, the contours of the land, and the faces I had met from the Altai to here.
I reached up to Tigon and scratched his chest. As I did he swung his eyes from the steppe to the steep slope ahead of us. Speckles of his saliva dropped onto my face, and I rolled over on my stomach to share the view of a new unknown.
Above us a rising blanket of mist was snagged on dense alpine forest. Every now and then pointy treetops tore a hole through it, offering fleeting glimpses of craggy peaks that form the periphery of the second-longest mountain range in Europe—a range that stretches in a horseshoe embrace around the frontiers of Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, and Romania like Europe’s insulation against the East.
Through this terrain the Mongols had once forged a path on their way to conquering Hungary. Setting off in the deep snows of winter in early 1241, they had somehow been able to navigate the labyrinth of forests and ridges and surge through the guarded high passes almost as if the mountains presented no barrier.
When King Bela IV of Hungary finally became convinced of the impending invasion, he naively hoped that cutting trees across the paths of the Carpathians and sending extra troops to man the forts would be enough to stop the Mongols, or at least give him time to prepare an army. But, as a measure of the sheer speed of the Mongol advance, only four days after Bela learned that the Mongols had attacked the Carpathian passes, news that they had fallen reached Buda. Once over the mountains, the Mongols flew across Hungary, covering 65 km a day, their advance ending in battles that would see half of Hungary’s population wiped out and the defeat of some of the most professional and prestigious armies of Europe.
Nowadays the Carpathians stood in a different era, crisscrossed by asphalt highways that connect Ukraine with central Europe. Some of the famous passes through which the Mongols had forged, are now little more than scenic overlooks where roadside souvenir and fast-food sellers take advantage of through traffic.
Riding along such roads, I could not hope to appreciate what the Mongols achieved, nor rekindle a sense of what it might have been like for these hardy nomads crossing into Europe. My plan was to avoid roads where possible and travel through the highest and most rugged section of the Ukrainian Carpathians, where, I had learned recently, there existed something that was more likely to capture the spirit of the nomads than was a ride along a highway.
Back in Crimea, the eyes of Ismet Zaatov, the Tatar deputy minister for culture, had lit up when I mentioned the Carpathians. “Our brothers live there—the Hutsuls,” he told me. “They are an example to us all, keeping their culture alive under the fists of the Russians. Most important for you are their horses, which they say are descendants of those left behind from the Mongols when they retreated from Europe in 1242.”
Where the Mongols had succeeded in crossing the Carpathians, the invasion of tractors, combines, bulldozers, and the penetrating policies of the Soviet machine had apparently failed. According to Ismet, the Hutsuls were a unique ethnic group who lived in the most inaccessible valleys and alpine plains, relying on the forest and the herding of sheep and cattle for subsistence. Their land, Hoverla, orbiting around the tallest peak of the Ukrainian Carpathians, was broadly known as Hutsulshchyna, and while there is no consensus as to the origins of the Hutsuls, the various hypotheses gave me reason to be excited.
Some believe the name Hutsul is derived from the old Slavic term kochul, which means “nomad,” and that they are possibly a Turkic people who fled to the mountains during the Mongol invasion of Russia. The more contemporary belief is that the name comes from the Romanian word hotul, meaning “outlaw,” and that they were descendants of a Slavic people who had lived in the Carpathians since the fourth century.
“When you get there, Tim, please give me a call,” Ismet had said. “I know the governor of the region, and I will make sure I arrange a special greeting for you.”
There came a shout from somewhere above in the forest, then the thud of an axe on wood. My horses stood to attention, their ears pointed forward like pistols. I pulled myself up in a hurry. From the mist above, four stocky men and their similarly built horses materialized towing freshly cut logs. They struggled to arrest the slide of the timber before coming to an unsteady halt.
“Good morning, men! Can you show me the way over to Berezhnytsia?” I called, referring to a hamlet marked on the map on the far side of the ridge.
Like horsemen of the steppe, they took their time to respond, first running their eyes over my equipment and tilting their heads sideways to peer under the legs of my horses, checking their status. As always, attention narrowed down to Ogonyok, who they all agreed would make a fine timber-pulling horse.
It wasn’t long before the youngest of the men unharnessed his horse, leaped on bareback, and led the way. We entered the forest via a track so narrow and crowded with crisscrossing branches that I was forced to dismount and follow the horses on foot. The fir trees and mist became ever denser, the sunlight withered, and Ogonyok struggled to squeeze between moss-laden trunks with his plastic pack boxes.
At the top of the ridge we came to a wind-raked saddle, then dropped beneath the cloud on the other side. When the mist had cleared, we brought the horses to a stop. From where we stood, the mountainside fell away into space. Across the valley on the opposite slopes, timber homes bordered by silver-gray fences and haystacks appeared painted onto a vertical canvas of green. The jingle of bells floated across to us from a flock of sheep making their way up toward an alpine meadow.
I had been accustomed to the drab, derelict collectives of Russia and Ukraine, and so Ismet’s account of the Hutsuls had been hard to believe. But now, as I gazed down into this otherworldly valley, my doubts vanished.
Sometimes such rosy first impressions are fleeting. Not so here. Over the next month my developing picture of Hutsulshchyna would prove to remain true to this fairy-tale exterior—a place elevated from the realities of both my personal challenges and the issues of the societies I had passed through. I would find the land and its people so engrossing that I could temporarily forget about the past and live unconcerned about all that the future held.
My introduction to the Hutsul people began in earnest at a cottage practically at the tree line. The young horseman pulled up at the gate. “They will certainly take you in for the night—that’s the Hutsul way!” he said, before using a twig for as a whip and galloping back up the slope.
True to the horseman’s pledge, a portly woman followed by her sheepish husband and elderly father emerged and ushered me in. Even before they introduced themselves they had invited me to stay for a week. “First things first, though,” the lady, named Maliya, said, hands on her generous hips. “You need a bath.”
As it turned out, Berezhnytsia was not so much a village but a community of around eighty homes and corrals sparsely dotted about the high slopes at the head of this remote valley. To reach my host’s cottage—like most others in Berezhnytsia—one needed to walk or ride along steep, ankle-breaking paths. The only evidence of the mechanical era was a deeply rutted track at the bottom of the valley, apparently bulldozed in the 1960s but rarely used.
To some it would have seemed a tough, isolated life, but not to Maliya. After I had washed, she fed me sour milk and blueberries and told me that they had “everything” in Hutsulshchyna. The cattle provided meat and milk, berries from the forest were plentiful, and every winter they harvested small fir trees, which they took
to eastern Ukraine to sell as decorative New Year trees. Having traveled through regions where collectivization had wiped out untold thousands of hamlets and family farms, I found the independent life she described novel and difficult to comprehend.
I asked her how it could be, and Vasili, her father stepped in to explain. He told me that the Hutsuls had never surrendered their homes. After World War II the Soviet state had officially taken over the land, but when the Soviet Union fell, the property was returned to the original owners or their descendants. “We might be Ukrainian, but we are first and foremost Hutsuls,” he said.
Judging by Maliya’s two-story timber cottage built into a cutting on the slope, the Hutsuls had also dodged the attack on cultural identity and traditional craftsmanship that had devastated so many ethnic groups across Eurasia under Stalin. I let my eyes filter down from the steep angled roof of a structure that could only be described as a work of art. The ridging that ran along the hips of the roof was decorated with thousands of motifs cut from shiny zinc sheets. Most of these seemed to be in the form of eagles and men reaching to the sky. The zinc cladding on the gable was worked into an extravagant mural of circle, diamond, and star shapes and featured depictions of animals. There were lions—a tradition, according to Vasili, that dated to an era when these predators still roamed Europe—encircled by doves. Framing them were flowers, suns, and thousands of other patterns, the details of which were only obvious up close.
The interior of the house was something else. Doors featured multicolored glass panels, and the ceilings were awash with hand-painted peacocks, wrens, and a dizzying array of floral patterns. There were woven mats and rugs, hand-woven blankets, Orthodox Christian icons, wood carvings, and a range of hanging carpets. The centerpiece of the house was the furnace, painted a lurid purple with repeated themes of lions, birds, and deer.