ukrainian folklore
Last fall I got really into the Carpathian mountains and the folk traditions of the people living on them, particularly the Hutsul people living in western Ukraine. The Hutsuls live a rural highland lifestyle as shepherds and farmers. Their population is very small, about 26,0001, and dwindling as young people seek employment in cities. I'm really enchanted by their folk traditions, art, and embroidery, and I recently finished reading a book of Hutsul folklore from my library.2 Because it's rather obscure and its content isn't available online, I wanted to post some of its stories here.
Many of these are adventure stories about the folk hero Dobosz, a Robin Hood-like brigand that steals from the Austro-Hungarian occupiers and brings the wealth back to the Ukrainian highlanders. You can really feel the love and reverence that the Hutsul people have for Dobosz in their songs about his adventures, about where he's buried, and how everyone knows his name.
The "living fire" refers to a tradition the Hutsuls share with many other cultures, where a fire is kept for years and years—theoretically, forever—with each generation tending it so that it never goes out. In the winter, I sat down with my friends and watched a documentary3 by that same name, over bread and cheese and eggnog.
The book is set in the nineteenth century, in Bukovina, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Bukovina spans part of both Ukraine and Romania, and it is where the Hutsuls are native to. (The Hutsuls themselves identify as Ukrainians.) My process of digitization was taking pictures of the pages, selecting the text using the Google Lens feature, combing through it to fix errors, and abridging it in some sections to remove antisemitism.
- people of the forest ✷
- toloka
- foka the dancer
- the raid on zlota bania ✷
- dobosz' memory
- brigands
- fighting with a bear ✷
- logging and industrialization ✷
- childbirth
- omens ✷
Source: Stryamets, N. et al. "'Mushrooms (and a cow) are a means of survival for us': Dissimilar ethnomycological perspectives among Hutsuls and Romanians living across the Ukrainian-Romanian border." Journal of Environmental Management, Vol. 72 Is. 2, Mar. 30, 2022. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8964239/. (I actually found this article pretty interesting and would recommend.)↩
The book is "On the High Uplands: Sagas, Songs, Tales, and Legends of the Carpathians" by Stanisław Vincenz.↩
We were able to find it on several of the major streaming platforms! You do have to pay a small fee and the subtitles are sort of half-existent, but if you just want to immerse yourself in mountainside shepherding, it is an excellent way to spend an evening.↩