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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

The Hutsuls are Coming!

13 November, 2012 - 00:00

Matthias Baitl, a third generation Austrian ethnologist, looking twenty something, returned from last year’s expedition in the Carpathian Mountains full of enthusiasm and far from empty-handed.

Apart from traditional needlework, quilts, wooden eagles, and serpents, he brought to Austria several packs of exotic Verkhovyna cigarettes with their acrid, hash smell and a couple of blue ties sparkling with beads, each patriotic-looking with a tryzub done in gold-colored thread. He says such ties are still popular at local bazaars, particularly in Kosiv.

Ten days ago his baroque Kittsee Palace near the Slovak border hosted an exhibit called Halychyna: An Ethnographic Survey Among the Boikos and Hutsuls in the Carpathians.” Most of the items on display were borrowings from the Vienna Folk Study Museum, actually, fragments of times long gone by. A collection gathered by a travelers in the time of yore otherwise known as the good old days. A territory known in Austria-Hungary as the “Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria” is to most of us a perfect terra incognita. Thus reads page 2 of the exhibit’s prospectus. Even less explored than the Amazon valley, I might add.

Why Amazon? Because the title page has a photo with an almost American Indian scene (turn of the century, no doubt): a Hutsul family with four children, all festively dressed, with traditional long ornamented miniature axes, against a wood country house. All assuming well rehearsed postures - posing for Viennese gentlemen was usual business for these Eastern Tyroleans. The colors can only be guessed. Each such black and white photo would fade with time and crack.

For decades the “progressive Austrian public” stubbornly and dedicatedly erased from their memories the empire’s black-and-gold stripe. Conscious disowning of one’s historical heritage, an attempt (and perhaps a successful one) to shape a different mentality, dynamic and modern, free from unnecessary historical burden. This approach was dictated by the Weltanschauung after two world wars, delimitation of frontiers, iron curtain, intellectuals turning left, etc.

Now, less than ten years after toppling the Wall, every time separate Vienna marginal enthusiasts set off on an Eastern pilgrimage, driven by Joseph Roth, Paul Zelian or even Hnat Khotkevych, “Galician Semi-Asia” greets them the way it is these days. Roads full of potholes, rivers rotting under heaps of garbage, illiterate parlance, Russian pop music, shashliks, and other signs of historic transformations.

Don’t get me wrong. I do not mean to dwell on belated attempts to retrieve the irretrievable or on some international conspiracies meant as encroachments on Halychyna (several days ago all such treacherous attempts received an impassioned rebuff in a sonorous radio speech delivered by an outstanding professional of patriotism, once Soviet and now integrally independent).

I mean those Hutsuls I saw in the photograph. They are now eternal. Every stifling summer evening they surround the neat baroque palace in Kittsee (now an ethnography museum) on all sides, struggling through the overgrown old park, scaring hares and pheasants, crossing an ancient alley, along which Esterhazi dukes once rode in their carriages heading for Poszony (now Bratislava), bursting into their palace, marching down corridors, entering rooms, crowding the concert hall with royal family portraits. The palace is now jammed with them, they speak in loud hoarse voices, shuffling their bast-shoes on the marble floor, singing juicy kolomyika couplets, waving their axes — and horror of all horrors! — smoking Verkhovyna cigarettes. They are here. They are alive. Try to integrate them into Europe!

 

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