Excerpted from the book "On the High Uplands: Sagas, Songs, Tales, and Legends of the Carpathians" by Stanisław Vincenz. This excerpt describes the "toloka," a band of volunteers that do manual labor in return for food, drink, and festivities.
The work proceeds in a spirit of merriment and fun and a mood of rivalry, so that it becomes rather like a sporting event. A long day of hard labour is followed by the entertainment—music, dancing, singing, story-telling, all the social amusements peculiar to the mountain-dweller. They dance everywhere: in the cottage, on the verandah, in the barn and in the open.
The love of dancing is universal and embraces all Hucul life. People of mature years and staid appearance, even the aged, all dance. The song tells of a farmer who danced so fervently that he even danced past his own salvation. "When I die, then I'll go to heaven. If they drive me out, I'll go and play my music."
There are many Hucul dances. The most common is the "kolo", the dance in a ring, which is called here the "Huculka". As many as twenty people, all linking arms, go swinging round with terrific impetus, accelerating the tempo until they are giddy. Sometimes the musicians start with the tempo for a whirlwind dance, sometimes they approach the climax gradually. The men vary the dance by squatting close to the ground and taking great leaps upward and sideways, and by shouting, singing, and firing their pistols. Sometimes one or more couples dance separately inside the ring; and then, while the ring spins round rapidly, but evenly and regularly like a wheel, the dancers shut inside dance more and more furiously.
The most extraordinary Hucul dances are those of men alone. There is the Robber dance, called the "arkan" (lasso), with its brisk rhythms and violent spins, each man choosing exactly the right moment for the spin. There is the very old dance called the "kruhlek", in which the dancers whirl round with raised axes. Both the "kruhlek" and the festive dances at Christmas-time reveal how much significance the weapon had in the old-time dance. The old stories relate that in former days sharp and heavy spiked axes were flung into the air to whistle threateningly above the dancers' heads, and there was so much firing of pistols that nothing could be seen through the thick smoke. Axe after axe flew merrily into the air through the smoke, and axe after axe fell, yet somehow no one was ever knocked down or hurt.
For people and families living in remote places, the "toloka", volunteer group labour, is an event of no little importance. The young enjoy themselves, the lads make up to the girls, the staid elders exchange thoughts. Often newly composed verses dealing with various events are sung, with a moving effect on the listeners. Sometimes a well-known story-teller or a chance volunteer holds the attention, keeping all the gathering spellbound with some fairy-tale, legend or story; and then the walls of the cottage seem to open, and tracks and precipices appear, with bands of brigands on nimble horses, youngsters armoured in gleaming brass, the bastions of Hungarian castles perched on cliffs, and the whirling glass palaces of dragons. Sometimes an old man with long grey hair sits down in the middle of the room, well away from the enormous hearth and chimney; and as the listeners crowd on to the benches, stools, and fireside seats, to the sound of cymbals and violins he sings in a recitative, beginning his story with:
"Listen, good people, to what I have to tell."