Boykos Erotic

The Boykos are the middle people of the Ukrainian Carpathians. Line the three highlander groups up from west to east and you get Lemkos, Boykos, Hutsuls, and the Boykos have spent centuries being defined by that middle position: less photographed than the Hutsuls, less politically noisy than the Lemkos, and spread over the largest territory of the three. Boykivshchyna follows the Beskid ranges and the mid-Carpathian valleys of what are now the Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk oblasts, reaches into northern Zakarpattia, and once ran west into the Bieszczady of present-day Poland. Even the name came from outside. Neighbors picked out a dialect particle the highlanders used constantly and turned it into a label. Among themselves they said verkhovyntsi, people of the heights, or simply named their village. Their speech is a southwestern Ukrainian dialect stiff with Carpathian vocabulary and older forms that wore away elsewhere, close enough to Lemko and Rusyn that where you draw the line has always been an argument with politics inside it.

Where Hutsul life ran on horses, sheep and high summer pasture, Boyko life ran on plowland: oats, flax and potatoes pulled out of thin mountain soil, oxen instead of horses, timber floated down the Dniester and the San, and seasonal work in the lowlands when the harvest came up short. That practicality made for an unshowy material culture with one spectacular exception. The Boyko church is one of the great vernacular building forms in Europe: three log chambers in a row, narthex, nave and sanctuary, each crowned by a tiered pyramid roof that steps up and inward like a stack of shrinking rooftops, the whole raised without nails and shingled in spruce. Several stand on the UNESCO list of Carpathian wooden tserkvas. Most Boykos are Greek Catholic, Byzantine in rite and in communion with Rome, which put the parish at the center of village authority and made the Soviet liquidation of that church in 1946 an attack on the culture as much as on the faith. The same century took the western half of Boykivshchyna apart: postwar border changes and the Polish deportation operation of 1947 emptied Boyko and Lemko villages out of the Bieszczady and scattered those families across northern Poland, and the Solina reservoir later flooded part of what was left. The emptiness that hikers now admire in those mountains has a cause. East of the border the villages held: the dialect is still spoken at home, the museums at Sambir and Dolyna keep the record, and the summer festivals go on doing the work of keeping alive a name the Boykos never chose for themselves.