Dukla 2.8.2004
In
our previous issue we brought you information about a young American
whose roots are in the region under Dukla. During his June visit
to our region he collected information on the life of Rusyn villages,
about the traditions of their residents and was interested in
everything related to Rusyns. Now we present some responses from
Richard Custer from Washington, DC, who in addition is a member of the
Carpatho-Rusyn Society in Pittsburgh.
* All your energy is directed toward
the collection of information about Rusyns, putting up Websites and
chronicling the life of Rusyns. Why are you interested in this?
- It was only about 15 years ago that I learned which villages my Rusyn
ancestors (my maternal grandparents) came from. Since then one of
my hobbies has been to research the Rusyn immigrant communities of the
state of Pennsylvania where I was born and raised, and where my Rusyn
ancestors spent most of their lives. It is also the state in the USA
with the highest number of Rusyn people -- probably over 250,000 people
of Rusyn ancestry live in Pennsylvania. I am now preparing to
publish a large book of the history of every Rusyn community in
Pennsylvania. Some of these communities were primarily made up of
Rusyns from villages in the Svidnyk / Pod-dukla region. And every
place in Pennsylvania where my Rusyn ancestors lived was one of these
communities that was mostly Rusyns from under Dukla.
* Are your Rusyn ancestors the
inspiration for this work, this hobby?
- My maternal grandparents came to America from villages in this
region: Prykra and Krajnja Poljana. They settled in America in
places like Passaic, New Jersey and Beaver Meadows, Pennsylvania and
Barnesboro, Pennsylvania where there were many, many other people from
these same Rusyn villages under Dukla: Krajnja Bŷstra,
Nyžnij Komarnyk, Vŷšnij Komarnyk, Ladomyrova, Bodrudžal, Hinkivci,
Krajnje Čorne,
Myrolja, Pstryna, Sucha, Medvedže, Krajnja Porubka, Korejivci, and Šarbiv.
People from these villages in America tended to marry others from their
village or one of the above-mentioned villages. And so in these
towns in Pennsylvania there were large communities of Rusyns from
villages under Dukla. In my own family, it seems that I have
ancestors who lived not only in Prykra and Krajnja Poljana but in some
of these other villages too. So it is very interesting for me to
learn about how they interacted with each other -- village to village
-- not only in Slovakia but also in the USA.
* This wasn't your first visit to
Slovakia.
- I have visited Slovakia several times, each time coming to the
Pod-dukla region taking photographs (of wooden and newer churches, at
the cemeteries, of village buildings, and of the beautiful landscape),
buying books, and collecting information about my family and other
families from these villages. Every trip I manage to find very
helpful people and helpful places to get this sort of
information. This trip I was helped the best by Mr. Andrij Kaputa
and the Štátny
okresný archív,
and Mr. Jan Cižmar of Svidnyk, as well as the Podduklianska
knižnica. I found much historical and cultural information that I
hope to translate into English and present as a detailed look at the
history and culture of the villages of the region under Dukla. And so
the best and easiest way to share this history and culture with as many
people as possible will be via the internet. So I created a few
basic pages that will soon grow into a large resource on the
region. It is called Rusyn Villages Under Dukla,
http://users.erols.com/rcuster/RusynsUnderDukla
* During your visit you also gathered
publications on individual villages. Did you succeed in gathering
from each village?
- Because the economic situation in the region is not very good, many
people are leaving the villages. And so, the villages in the
region under Dukla in particular are becoming very small -- e.g.,
Prykra and Šarbiv
are the smallest and (I think) next-smallest villages in all of
Slovakia -- and so they do not have the financial and other resources
to do things that some other villages have done, like publish a book
about their history. (I am thinking here of very nice books published
about / by Habura, Pŷchni,
Porač, Kuriv, Kamjunka and other Rusyn villages.) So if I were to
do research on the history of these villages and put them together on a
web site (as I am doing) in addition to the information I have on the
"Rusyns from under Dukla" communities in the USA, I could help others
to learn about these villages even if the village cannot publish its
own history book. Actually I hope that sometime in the future, I may
have enough information to publish such a book, on the history of these
villages. This may be a project that our American organization,
Carpatho-Rusyn Society, may be willing to publish. But for now,
it will be good to have it on the Web since even more people worldwide
would be able to access it. Hopefully people in Slovakia who
themselves or their parents came from these villages may also find the
information of interest and I also hope they may contribute to the
site, with historic photographs from the village and of their
families. Finally, I hope that at least in some small way, to
have this information presented in a positive way, that those people
who come from villages in the region under Dukla will feel some pride
in their Rusyn roots / identity, and pride in the humble origin of
their ancestors, their Rusyn culture, and their Greek Catholic /
Orthodox faith.
* During our meeting on your last
visit, you spoke Rusyn very well. What is your opinion of our
Rusyn villages?
- I notice that while these villages have mostly ethnic-Rusyn
inhabitants and everyone there speaks Rusyn, almost none of the
villages has enough people who declared Rusyn nationality on the Slovak
census to have their village sign in Rusyn. I think this is very
unfortunate. I understand some of the reasons why this has
happened, but when you go to the villages it is very clear that it is a
Rusyn village, that the people there are Rusyns. So why should
their village sign not be in Rusyn? It is somewhat depressing to
me, who in the USA am known as a Rusyn activist, that my ancestral
villages seem to hide the fact that they are Rusyn. Assimilation is a
hard thing to fight against, but if we care that our children know that
they are Rusyns and if we care that they speak the Rusyn language and
keep our Rusyn customs and know the history of our people, why cannot
you report to the government that your nationality is Rusyn and that
your mother tongue is Rusyn? If Slovakia is a free country and a
modern society, to be Rusyn and to declare it is a positive
thing! It means that an open society has nothing to fear from
"national minorities" who are the social and economic equal of anyone
else in the society. The whole region under Dukla is thoroughly
Rusyn in character, yet there are few villages where this character is
proclaimed by something as simple as the sign with the name of the
village. And it seems to me that this is one of the simplest things to
do, to slow down assimilation: tell the government you are Rusyn, have
your neighbors do the same, and make sure that your village is known
*officially* as a Rusyn village.
Dukla, 2 August 2004