by Tim Cope
With the two men shyly following in tow, Maliya took me to her room and pulled down a wooden picture frame with a black and white photo of a young couple in traditional dress. “These are my grandparents. Before deciding to build here, my grandfather watched carefully for the places where the cows liked to lie down. Once he found this place, he spent a night sleeping on the earth. According to Hutsul belief, if one dreams about cattle, then it is a sign the site is blessed.”
Ivan, her husband, disappeared into the attic, then came back timidly holding an antique that wouldn’t have been out of place in Mongolia. Carved with symmetrical lines, diamonds, and coils, it was a wooden saddle so small and delicate that Ivan could hold it up with two fingers. It was clearly designed for a short-backed horse. Vasili and Ivan were convinced of its origins: “Just like the horses and the saddles, there is Mongol influence among us Hutsuls! Some of us have high cheekbones and slanty eyes!” they chuckled.
There were untold centuries of history in this saddle, but Vasili sadly explained that the man who had crafted it had died thirty years before. “These days everyone in our valley rides bareback,” he said. He now used the saddle for ferrying supplies to the house on a packhorse.
In the morning I stepped into the theater of high peaks and forest. I felt at ease. To see the horses grazing and Tigon off the leash brought a sense of calm and completeness I had not found in the villages and towns. I could sympathize with the words of Stanislaw Vincenz, an influential Polish writer who grew up among the Hutsuls at the turn of the twentieth century: “All they [the Hutsuls] know about towns is that they stink till you choke, that there is no water there, and nothing to be seen, and they are terribly short of room … A town is a calamity, a work of the devil.” In the Hutsul uplands, according to him, “distances and journeys” were “not recounted in hours, nor—God forbid—in minutes, like trains, but in days and weeks.” There was a sense of time here “not to be compared with foreign time.”
For me there was nevertheless a pressing need to move on. For years I had been lobbying the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) to support a proposal for a documentary film about my journey. Just before my dad passed away, the ABC had promised a development grant sufficient to pay for veteran Australian adventure cinematographer Mike Dillon to join me and film the kind of shots impossible alone. He planned to spend two or three weeks with me on foot, and I had prearranged a rendezvous point not far from Berezhnytsia in a village called Krivorivnya. Although Mike wasn’t due for a few days, word had it that the priest of Krivorivnya was awaiting my arrival.
It took a day to descend to the Cheremosh, a fast-moving river that carved a serpentine path through the bowels of the mountains. Compared to where I had just come from, the air was damp, the sky crowded in, and there was even an asphalt road. But as I rode into Krivorivnya, a string of homes built between the bottom of the slopes and the rapids of the Cheremosh, it was clear that the town was anything but the “work of the devil.”
Striding up the street came a man so much larger than life that the mountains shrank around him. He stood 2 m tall and was built like an ox; his long, flowing dark hair and bushy beard were matched by a black robe dragging at his heels. He had eyebrows that spread over his face like the wings of an eagle, drawing attention to dark, deep-set eyes. In another life he had been a Hare Krishna devotee, but the large golden cross that bounced about his chest left no doubt as to his prevailing faith. In fact, if ever there was a reincarnation of Jesus Christ, then it was he who now had his eyes locked on me and was fast approaching.
“Ribaruk, Ivan, priest of Krivorivnya, welcome!” he bellowed. I surrendered my hand to his bear-like grip.
Ivan and I got along like old friends from the beginning. Nudging forty years of age, he was still bristling with a kind of rebellious youth, and out of his robes could well have been mistaken for a charismatic rock star. During his student days, mountaineering and travel had been his passion. In fact, it had been while climbing in the high Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan that he resolved to become a priest. “I reached a peak around six thousand metres high and realized that I didn’t want to go down. Below it was full of problems that humans had created, and I just wanted to keep climbing up to the sky,” he told me.
After completing theological studies, he had returned to the playground of his childhood in Krivorivnya, where at the young age of twenty-nine he was elected priest of the parish. He had since married a local poet, Oksana. These days Ivan did not have much time for mountaineering, but he still put his skills to good use. One of his chief responsibilities was to bless all the houses in the village and the outlying mountain communities—about six hundred—as well as the rivers, streams, and wells that were within the boundaries of his parish. To do this involved setting off on a two-week trekking expedition in winter every year.
I would spend a week in Krivorivnya, lodged at a guesthouse on the church grounds. During this time I came to appreciate that for Ivan, Ukrainian Orthodox Christianity—as opposed to the Russian denomination—was a profound symbol of Ukrainian independence. More specifically, his church in Krivorivnya had remained open since 1620, defying closures during Soviet times. With handwritten scriptures in the Hutsul dialect and traditions unique to the region, the church, as Ivan said, lay at the heart of Hutsul life and culture.
Only one day after arriving I returned with Ivan to Berezhnytsia, where a ceremony in honor of Saint Nikolai had been scheduled. To get there we joined a throng of babushkas, elderly men, and children hitching a ride on the back of a former army truck. On the last stretch of road before town the truck threatened to slide. Up on top we clung to swaying slabs of beer and soft drinks.
The wooden church where the celebration was to be held was situated at the base of the head of the valley. As we arrived, young and old were converging from the slopes. Elderly men steeled themselves down narrow paths on walking staffs, and babushkas straddled wooden fences. Some teenage boys rode horses down slopes so steep they nearly rested the back of their head on the horse’s rump as they went.
It was the kind of clear day when the sky appears close, and in the unfiltered light, the traditional dress worn by the people glittered from afar. The men wore stiff bowler hats, known as krysani, and heavy, sheepskin vests, called kyptars, embellished with braided multicolored cords and all manner of shiny buttons, sequins, and metal studs. Some hats were more extravagant than others, covered by hundreds if not thousands of these bright spangles and topped off with feathers. The women wore long embroidered dresses and handcrafted jewelry ranging from gold and silver coin necklaces to glass beads fitted tightly around the throat. There was many a teary eye as this rush of color congregated. Ivan and Vasili—my hosts from earlier—were among them. “You see,” Vasili said, “we Hutsuls don’t just wear our clothes for show. They carry the soul of our ancestors and of our belief in God.”
There was no clear-cut beginning or end to the proceedings. The hundreds of people who had come to celebrate could not fit inside the church, and so there was a slow shuffling queue moving in through the door at the front and out another. Inside, Ivan and two other priests went through an exhaustive series of prayers and songs, acknowledging those who reached the front with a swinging thurible casting thick incense smoke. The interior of the church was filled with the same overwhelming color as Maliya’s house, but with the addition of a sophisticated network of fluorescent green, purple, and white disco lights flashing robotically around the icons of Saint Nikolai.
It must have been two or three hours by the time Ivan, sweating like a shaman in a trance, led the congregation outside and stood before a wooden barrel of holy water. There, adorned with a silky orange and golden mantle, he held up a cross to the sky and went into deep whispers of prayer. When this was done he lowered the cross into the water before again raising it and patting it dry. As his prayers came to an end the crowd descended to drink from the barrel.
After the ceremony Ivan changed into simpler vestm
ents, champagne was popped, violins were brought out, and we retired to a nearby cottage, where dance and song hummed through the wooden floors and walls. Our celebrations were rounded off by a visit to an eighty-four-year-old hatmaker called Vasil, who had been making traditional clothing from the age of sixteen. In his remote mountain abode, he invited me to a dark, hidden room in the attic. When he turned on a flashlight I realized that the hard wooden shape pushing against my thigh was a coffin.
“This is older than you are, boy!” he said, grinning. “Made of light wood, too, so that when they carry me out of here, they don’t drop me! Every real Hutsul must make his own coffin by the time he is forty.” He lifted the lid. There, laid out, was a traditional costume including boots, trousers, and a hat. Vasil shuffled around and brought out a metal headstone plate engraved with his name and birth date. A blank space was set aside for the day of his passing. “Hutsuls don’t fear death. But we must prepare to meet God, and for that it is expected you will be dressed in your best outfit.”
On the way back down Ivan described a Hutsul legend: “When God was giving out land the Hutsuls turned up late and all that was left were these harsh, infertile mountains. However to compensate, he gave them generous helpings of creativity.”
On the evening of May 25 a rather jet-lagged Mike piled out of a car with his backpack and camera gear. The lanky sixty-one-year-old Australian cut a humble figure. Soft-spoken, with wide blue eyes and wavy silver hair, he was dressed in worn cargo trousers, creased old boots, and a checkered shirt. I’d warned him about weight limits for baggage on the horses, and he had kept to his word, bringing only two sets of clothes.
Ahead of us lay a crossing of the Chorna Gora, a wall of peaks that rise in the heart of Hutsulshchyna, including Ukraine’s highest mountain, Hoverla, at 2,061 km. In my short time in Krivorivnya, I had learned it was a place enshrined in local legend through songs and folklore about tales of high adventure—such as that of the eighteenth-century outlaw Oleksa Dobosz, known as the Robin Hood of the Hutsuls.1
Hutsul shepherds and their families had been making annual migrations to the high slopes on and around Chorna Gora for centuries. There in the summer months they grazed their animals in alpine meadows known as polonina. Most of the older folk in Krivorivnya had worked as shepherds on the Chorna Gora in their youth, and while they admired my plan to cross the peaks, they had stern warnings. “Every year shepherds are killed by lightning! You could be caught in a snowstorm! Eaten by wolves! Or, God forbid, lost in the forest—there are such big, dense forests that you can easily get lost for days.”
Our send-off from Krivorivnya was marked by a traditional ceremony—an event Ivan said was reminiscent of the annual farewell for shepherds and their families traveling to the high slopes. With Ivan leading on foot, a drumroll, violins, and a long horn known as a trembita heralded our approach to the front gates of the village school.2 As I urged the nervous horses closer, a group of pretty girls in traditional dress stepped forward with wreaths of crepe-paper flowers to tie to the horse’s halters. When the horses shied away, the girls found a more appreciative recipient in Tigon. As all three wreaths were tied around his collar, he sat with his chin raised high.
Ivan had insisted we take someone to help us find our way across the highest peaks, and at his request a veteran mountaineer, Yuri Wadislow, and a man called Grigori from the mountain rescue squad had agreed to come. For the final part of the ceremony, Yuri, Grigori, Mike, and I lined up to be blessed. Ivan came to us one by one, said a prayer, and doused us with holy water. He blessed the horses, too, and said a prayer for Tigon.
It took a long day’s ride to reach the outpost village of Shiben, which lay at the feet of the Chorna Gora. Along the way a thunderstorm smacked into the mountains, followed by a torrential downpour, turning the Cheremosh into a dirty brown torrent. The river had broken its banks and torn apart several timber bridges. If the conditions were so turbulent down here, it was daunting to imagine what it was like up high.
In the morning Mike, Yuri, and Grigori shouldered backpacks and we heaved our way up a forest path. We were not the only people making for the polonina, however. Not far into the trek a squall of curses and neighing rang out through the forest. Near the base of a particularly steep track I came across two Hutsul horses harnessed to a heavily laden cart. The cart had jackknifed and sat at right angles in the mud. The drunken cart drivers were beating the horses with straps and chains. They wanted to borrow my horses to help pull the cart up, and when I refused, the abuse turned on me. A man with a balding head and fiery eyes flew at Kok and Ogonyok with his fist: “Come here or I will cut you down the Bandera way!” When I backed away, the men calmed down a little and explained they were heading to a polonina known as Vesnyak, where they planned to live for three to four months. Cattle and sheep from Shiben had been driven up ahead.
Mike, Yuri, and the others caught up, and we carried on. That afternoon we reached the alpine meadows, and after overnighting in a cluster of knotted pines we began the climb in earnest.
Not far above camp we moved into a shroud of cloud and onto the top of the main ridge. The mist was so thick it felt like we were burrowing our way through the mountains, but at times when it thinned out I caught glimpses of the abyss that fell away on both sides. We paused by memorials to two young boys who had died the previous summer during a lightning storm. Those markers were the first of many we would see in the coming weeks.
When evening came we had been moving for almost ten hours, the mist had not lifted, and we were all feeling a little frayed. Grigori and Yuri had begun to bicker between themselves.
After pitching camp, Mike and I climbed up to a peak just in time to see the mist fall away and reveal our first full view of the Chorna Gora ridge. Like the twisted torso of a serpent, it stretched ahead, joining a series of peaks. Along the edges scabby snowdrifts formed cornices. Above it all hovered the distant dome of Hoverla.
The Carpathians weren’t the tallest peaks in the world, but from here they had a grandeur befitting the history they had played theater to. Not only had the Mongols surged across these mountains, but the plethora of nomads before them—Huns, Scythians, and the Magyars, to name a few. In more recent times, as evidenced by stone markers we had seen along the ridge, it had also been the shifting boundary between the Austro-Hungarian and Polish empires, not to mention the scene of fierce fighting between Nazis and the Red Army.
In the morning we were back on the ridge. Clouds were colliding with the east face, then hurtling up like waves, breaking over the lip of the cliffs, and crashing down to the west. Unperturbed, Tigon spent most of the time scouring the slopes, appearing from time to time poised over great precipices of ice and rock. More than once he disappeared for an extended time, and I was sure, as I had been so many times before on my journey, that he was gone forever.
Just after lunch we reached the first of several impasses. The ridge had narrowed to a razorback where one slip on steep rock or snow meant that the entire caravan would tumble down. After scouting the route, we took a line along the eastern side of the ridge. The first section was around 50 m of rock, leading to a snowdrift. I began with Taskonir, watching as he nervously inched his way forward. His hooves scraped and slipped across the broad faces of the rocks but, fortunately, caught on to cracks and gaps. The last 10 m were the most delicate, requiring navigation down a ledge to a small flat rock. Taskonir studied the way ahead, then came down in a controlled slide, coming safely to rest at my feet.
Ogonyok was less elegant. He stood on the point of a rock with his front legs together, his half-tonne frame and 50 kg load teetering over the edge. With a tug on the lead rope he scraped and slipped his way down, miraculously landing on all fours at the bottom. Kok followed in similar fashion.
The snowdrift proved impossible to negotiate, and so there began an operation to get the horses up over the ridge to the far side, where it was rocky but free of snow. The whole procedure took a couple of hours, by which
stage Yuri, who was inexperienced with horses and accustomed to mountaineering in far more dangerous terrain, became impatient, shouting, “Those Mongols certainly didn’t come over this way, did they?”
Yuri and Grigori’s bickering escalated as we continued. In the end, Yuri strode out ahead, refusing to listen to Grigori, and made his way straight up to the summit of a peak. An hour later we were staring down a face of steep, jagged rocks. Grigori had had enough. “I am going home! I warned you, Yuri! My body can’t take any wasted effort!”
By the time we retreated, the sky had turned dark and the heavens opened. Although Mike, Grigori, and I shrank into our raincoats, Yuri came to life. “Tim, you waste time like you are a rich man! In the mountains every second counts!” He had thinly veiled his feelings about this several times. For him, packing carefully and allowing time for the horses to graze and rest were unnecessary. The concept of a multiyear journey and the sustainable cadence and patience it required was beyond him. “We will not get through now! We will have to cut our way through these bushes! People have become lost and died here!” His words were lost in the thunder and rain as I tied the horses up, my mind elsewhere.
If Yuri, who had traveled widely himself, was unable to appreciate the scale of my journey, then how could anyone in Europe have comprehended the Mongols or the threat they posed on the eve of their invasion of Hungary and Poland? By the time the Mongols had reached the Carpathians in 1241, they had already created the largest land empire in history and developed what was arguably the most sophisticated army of the era. Their exploits had included a defeat of much of China, Central Asia, Persia, and more recently Russia.3 Among the sixty thousand hardened horsemen who had crossed through these mountains, it is not hard to imagine there were men who had been on continuous campaigns for twenty years or more. For them, the Carpathians must have been more like the backwater hills commonly found at home in Mongolia.