Polissia| Poltavshchyna| Podillia| Donechchyna| Carpathians| Slobozhanshchyna| Bessarabia
For some reason, my trips to Podillia are associated with funny situations. In 2002, a cheerful group of us set off towards Medzhybizh, including Andre Erlen (a filmmaker, my future husband, from Germany), Przemek Serachynski (a photographer from Poland whose great-grandmother had an estate in the village of Mykhaylivtsi), and Victoria Khana, a singer from Israel, with whom we wanted to visit the places where Hasidism was born in Ukraine.
We arrived in the village of Mykhaylivtsi in the evening, and therefore looked too suspicious to the locals. Distrusting the ‘drug addicts’, no one let us in and we had to go somewhere else to find a place to stay. It was autumn, the roads in the village were muddy, and our old car got stuck right in the middle of the village in a large swamp. By some miracle, we pulled it out, the boys were covered in mud from head to toe, so Victoria and I went to find a room in a hotel in Krasyliv, and we secretly let the boys in through the back door, and since we had enough money only for one room, the boys had to sleep on the floor, and we had a lot of fun laughing that night over ‘Mr’ Serachynski.
The next day, the singers from Mykhaylivtsi kept apologising and then sang to us until the night and showed us a special ritual that is still practiced in Mykhaylivtsi - the Kolodka. They also told us and sang ‘christening’ stories.
When we came to the Vinnytsia region in 2007 with an equally colourful group of musicians and artists - Bernard Fingas from Germany and Lars Jean, a filmmaker from America of Afghan-Polish origin - we almost had to flee from one village to save our ‘foreign guests’ from forced marriage with local girls.
And another story - once on the road, I stopped to spend the night in a ‘hostel’ with a group of women from the market. As it happened, a table was set, I, a ‘child’, was invited too, and only then, before going to bed in the dark, the women began to tell fairy tales and ‘truth’. I don't remember if I dared to secretly turn on the recorder, but I have scribbled notes in my notebook, and I have written down the words and melody of the lullaby I heard, and I have written down two stories about a guy who dreamed of his bride and second - about a girl who loved a bird, told by Maria Filipovna from the village of Bokhdanivka, Ulianivsk district, Kirovohrad region.
Many thanks to Oksana Hryhorivna Sobko for the audio recordings and photos from her family archive. The materials are published with her permission with the words: ‘This is my family archive, sung by Antonina Ananiivna Tymchenko, my grandmother, my mother's mother. I recorded it so that it would not be lost, so that people could hear the authentic examples of Podillia-Volyn singing.
The recordings were made with the participants: Polina (Pavlyna) Servetnyk (born in 1932), Reviuk Olena Opanasivna (born in 1932), Yavorivtsi village, Krasyliv district, Khmelnytskyi region, Antonina Ananiivna Tymchenko (born in 1930), Krasyliv. Recorded in 2010.
Follow this link to listen online or download from Google Drive (in parts or separate folders).
Follow this link to view or download all the photos from the region.
Фото з архіву Оксани Собко, Хмельниччина 2010
Polissia| Poltavshchyna| Podillia| Donechchyna| Carpathians| Slobozhanshchyna| Bessarabia