Dolinyans Erotic

The Dolinyans were the valley people of the San River country. They were Ukrainian-speaking villagers who farmed the river bottoms and lower foothills of what is now southeastern Poland, below the mountains where the Lemkos and Boykos lived. The name comes from dolyna, valley, and it tells you where they lived rather than what they wore or believed. Ethnographers used it to set these lowlanders apart from the mountain groups. The villagers themselves usually called themselves Rusyns, the old name for the Ruthenian people of Galicia. The same name is also used for lowland Rusyns in Transcarpathia, on the far side of the Carpathians. The Dolinyans of Nadsiannia, the San basin, are a separate group on the northern side of the mountains.

They speak the San dialects of Ukrainian, part of its southwestern group, and have plenty of close neighbors. Lemko is spoken to the southwest and always stresses the second-to-last syllable. Boyko is spoken to the southeast, and Polish is spoken in the next village over, sometimes in the same one. In this border country a Rusyn farm and a Polish farm could look much alike. The church told them apart. Dolinyans were Greek Catholics. They worshipped in the Byzantine rite under the Eparchy of Przemyśl, kept Christmas and Easter by the Julian calendar, and gathered in wooden churches called tserkvas, a number of which still stand. When a Greek Catholic married a Roman Catholic, an old Galician rule decided the children's church by sex: sons followed the father, daughters the mother. A family could end up split between two churches, and in this region church and nationality tended to go together.

History was hard on this land. Przemyśl, the region's old center, was ruled by its own princes in the days of Kyivan Rus. It passed to the Polish crown in the fourteenth century and to Habsburg Austria in 1772. In 1918 Poles and Ukrainians fought in its streets, and in 1939 the San River became the line between German and Soviet occupation. The real break came after the war. From 1944 to 1946 many Dolinyans were moved east to Soviet Ukraine in a population exchange that was voluntary mostly on paper. In 1947 Operation Vistula deported those who remained to the former German lands of northern and western Poland. Poles resettled some villages, and others simply emptied. Today the Dolinyans live on in the family memories of descendants in Ukraine and across Poland, and in the churches, cemeteries and place names still scattered through the San valley.