Lemkos Erotic

Lemkos are the westernmost of the Carpathian Rusyns, an East Slavic highland people from the Low Beskids and Sącz Beskids between the Poprad and Osława rivers in southeastern Poland. Related communities live across the ridge in Slovakia's Prešov region and in a corner of Ukrainian Transcarpathia, though there the usual self-name is Rusnak or Rusyn. The Lemko name began as a nickname. Neighbors noticed the word lem, 'only', a Slovak loan missing from other Rusyn speech, and used it to mark them out. By the early twentieth century the group had adopted it.

That borrowed word says a lot about the language. Lemko keeps East Slavic grammar and Cyrillic but has fixed penultimate stress, like Polish and eastern Slovak, and a heavy West Slavic vocabulary. Whether it is a Ukrainian dialect or a language within Rusyn is a political question as much as a linguistic one, and Lemkos are split on it. A short-lived Lemko Republic at Florynka in 1918 asked to join Russia or Czechoslovakia rather than Poland or Ukraine. Poland now recognizes Lemkos as an ethnic minority with a language of their own. Religion is Eastern Christian under two roofs. Lemko parishes were Greek Catholic from the late seventeenth century, Byzantine liturgy under Rome, but conversions to Orthodoxy that began at Tylawa in 1926 divided villages, and both churches remain. The visible legacy is the wooden tserkva: shingled, three-towered churches at Kwiatoń, Owczary, Brunary, and Powroźnik now carry UNESCO status.

The defining event is dispersal. Between 1944 and 1946 the majority of Polish Lemkos were transferred to Soviet Ukraine. In 1947 Operation Vistula deported nearly everyone left to Poland's newly acquired western and northern territories, scattering families across Lower Silesia and Pomerania and forbidding return. Some drifted back after 1956, but the Beskid valleys are still full of empty village sites, orchards gone wild, and roadside crosses with no farm behind them. Most Lemkos today live in Legnica, Wrocław, and other western Polish cities, in western Ukraine, or in North America, and being Lemko is something maintained rather than inherited by default. The annual Vatra festival at Zdynia is the largest gathering, and the men's chuha, a long brown wool coat with a wide fringed collar hanging down the back, still comes out for it. Before 1947 Lemkos were known as much for travel as for farming: itinerant tar sellers from Łosie, stonecutters from Bartne, and spoon carvers from Nowica worked circuits far beyond the mountains. The naive painter Nikifor of Krynica is the best known Lemko name in Poland, and Andy Warhol's parents came from a Rusyn village on the Slovak side.