Excerpted from the book "On the High Uplands: Sagas, Songs, Tales, and Legends of the Carpathians" by Stanisław Vincenz. Abridged slightly.
Mountain Time
The memory of past events is enduring, for stories are passed down in the living word. Other tribes have their old books, their sacred writings and Holy Bibles, their supremely wise Talmuds; but our mountain people have a living book as long as they have the old people, the story-tellers, who draw upon the sources of the past. To the people of former days a hundred years was not so long after all, and two hundred was nothing of importance: not only because they lived long, but also because the living memory endured. Today a man accustomed to going about the mountains will tell a stranger asking the way: "From Pysany Kamen to the church at Krasnojilka is not very far, only a few minutes"—and the stranger will go on walking for five hours by his watch. To Holowy or the Skupowo pasture he will be told it is a little farther, and will take an hour or so; and sometimes a whole day is not enough. So, too, for the old story-tellers the days of Dobosz, or the days of the Turks, or even the times of struggle against the Syrojids, or against the Tatar enslavement, seemed not so very long ago. It was only yesterday. So the forefathers told. Perhaps not so little as that, but it would not be a hundred years—it was quite recent.
Many a story-teller travelled backward and forward through those distant times as freely as though he were going about his own expansive upland. This breath from the past, this sense of its proximity, is fortified by the ancient and mighty forests, which are not of today nor of yesterday, and will not perish tomorrow. Wonders still occur even today, and will go on occurring so long as the forests endure, so long as there are old story-tellers, so long as all measure of time is unknown.
In the mountains haste is unnecessary. Everything is done betimes, everything happens at the right moment. No one is ever late; for a man prefers to get up early, to finish early, to get out early, to be sure that he always has enough time. So it was of old. Distances and upland journeys were not reckoned in hours, nor—God forbid—in minutes, like trains, but in days and weeks. Hurry is a kind of eccentricity, and continual haste is a matter for laughter. You will not get far in a hurry; on the other hand, without hurry you will surely outdistance those who hurry. Many a man has regretted haste, when he has been too quick to pay back some old score and knock his opponent down, or when he has been in too much of a hurry with a purchase, a sale, or a contract. And the mountain tracks were not made for hurryings. Violent downpours and floods, sudden storms, all conspired to make hurry difficult, undesirable, and even very dangerous.
And is it seemly for a worthy, dignified mountain farmer to hurry? It is understandable that in the old days the robbers, like birds of prey, could move quickly; but what farmer would hurry even today, let alone in the former years? An excitable [person] hurries, God knows why, a flighty young man hurries, as he steals away from another man's wife at dawn; or some suspect tramp or vagabond. But never a farmer. If anything urgent should happen—which God forbid in his life, something as violent as thunder, or an assault, or a pursuit, or some unfortunate accident, that is something to sing songs and tell stories about for years after; but it is quite outside the round of his ordinary existence.
When mountain farmers meet they always have time to exchange greetings. The greeting is the more pleasant, the greater the heartiness displayed. Courtesy is highly valued by the lonely people who spend so much time in the unpopulated forests and the upland wilds… taciturn people do not need to talk, but they should always halt and listen and not contradict. It is customary to be courteous even to the husbandman's horse—"And how are you, poor old boy?" Without courtesy, without time for courtesy, the mountain farmer is not respectable.
Often they greet each other when still some distance off, shouting at the tops of their voices, until the forests roar back:
"Greetings, dear Wasylko! Praise to Jesus!"
The answer comes equally thunderous: "Praise be to God and to you, Dmytryk!"
They approach, they grip and shake hands, and the old people still observe the habit of kissing each other's hand.
"God aid you on your journey."
"God be with you too."
"Are you well?"
"Well; and you?"
"How are you getting on? What sort of day have you had? What sort of night?"
"In peace."
"And the family?"
"In peace."
"And your fathers?"
"In peace."
"Your dear wife, and your little ones?"
"In peace."
"And what's the news down in the valley? Relatives all kindly?"
"All right at present; God suffers us, and is kind."
"And what's the news on the peaks?"
"Ah, on the peaks life is hard, it's the same for us as for these upland spruces. But thank the Lord, it's healthy, free, and merry."
They sit down, light their pipes, and are brought steadily closer by their conversation. How are the bulls, how the cows, the heifers, the sheep, the horses?
"Thanks for asking, may you live to a good old age. The merciful God is allowing us to rear them. The calves, foals and lambs have begun to arrive. And the bulls have fattened up; ah, they're dragons, not bulls!"
"And the weather?"
"Thanks to the sun, God's face, we're able to get in the hay."
"But on our Kiczera upland there was a hailstorm on Sunday, with great stones; the cloud spirits rattled and groaned. It put us in a fair fright. But the people are all safe still. They drove it away with spells and prayers and thrust it into the abyss, among the rocks, into the unknown."
"Praise be to all the saints known and unknown."
"But how about the wild beasts up on the heights?"
"Oh, I hear wolves are out attacking the young cattle; but that's somewhere on Brustury, and all's well at the moment in our parts. But we're on the watch."
After this indispensable exchange of greetings they settle down to discuss in rather more detail all that is happening in the village and in the world. Curious and wonderful is the manner (strangers call it the "mountain telephone") by which news is spread around the mountains, penetrating to the most remote spots. It arrives very quickly, but just as quickly it changes beyond recognition. And in this changed form it persists for years.
[much of the "curious news" about "distant countries" that gets spread through the mountain telephone is just really racist, so I've omitted the examples listed]
No one has the means or the will to check these stories; everybody repeats them in good faith, ostensibly exactly as he hears them.
One farmer or another has been to the church festival at Jasinia, in Hungary, or to the market in Kosow, or has journeyed as far as Stanislawow, in Galicia, and that more than once. You even come across old hands who have acted as guards to the Christian Emperor himself, and can talk about it as long as you like. Then there is the man who, when young, felled his enemy with an axe—by mischance, of course; for accidents do happen. The poor wretch died—he was a bit of a weakling, you know. The story got round, and the court sent the attacker to prison. He spent no little time there, with the criminals and prisoners, in Budapest or Arad. But he got to know quite a lot of the world, and people too; and he will tell you all about it, and it is a story worth hearing.
There were other story-tellers, like Foka Szumej himself, like the headman of Zabie, Dmytrey, or like the famous Andrijko, who had been to Venice and had even visited the Holy Father in Rome. On the other hand, in the old days there were many, and even now there are not a few, who have never been even so far as Kosow in all their lives. They have not been in any town since their birth. All they 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. The houses are set one on top of another, and the poor people live like that for years, one crowding on the head of another. But sometimes one of these "untravelled" farmers has to go on a journey to a town, either to Kosow or as far as Kolomyja itself, and that is sheer misfortune. Like his untravelled horse, which wanders freely over the pastures every summer, he easily gets panicky and loses much time, and loses all sorts of other things. On the lowland main roads the carters are in a terrible hurry, goodness knows what for. A driver will shout and threaten when quite a long way off; but the farmer only gapes, and the cart drives straight at him, hurts his horse and shakes him up. And then the lowland driver, the filthy little man, having no idea whatever of courtesy, swears in such language that in the mountains he would get his head knocked off for it. But here it does not seem to mean a thing, and he just drives on. A poor lot, those people! The farmer arrives in the town either too early, at dawn, and there waits patiently outside an office until noonday; or, though he arrives in broad daylight, for some reason he has arrived too late for the officials, and so he can wait overnight. They have their own time.
And in the town itself there is more trouble. When they see a farmer coming on his horse loaded with blankets and well saddled, all the town idlers, rogues and pickpockets swarm round him like mosquitoes and flies. They play on him till in the end they have got all his money out of him. And sometimes it happens that some cur will simply snatch the money out of his hand and run away. And then try looking for the rogue, when everybody in the town looks alike! Go to the police about it, and when at last you find them they get angry and swear at you as if it were their money you had lost. And the senior officers laugh and joke as though it was funny. A town is a calamity, a work of the devil. You can go to whatever soothsayer or magician you like in the mountains, and you can even pay him in advance, but he is of no help whatever against the demons of the town.
But what happens when those town ruffians come up into our mountains? Here any feeble lad will run for cheese and butter to the summer hut on the upland you can see from here, a couple of steps as you might say, and be there and back in an hour or so. But the townspeople call it an excursion, and they have to sleep a whole day beforehand and for two days after. They walk along like sheep behind a funeral procession... And then they turn round and tell you it is not healthy to go rushing about the mountains too fast; but they think it healthy to live in a town! Time in the mountains is quite different, it is not to be compared with foreign time.