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| Siemuszowa old cemetery 2009 |
The old cemetery in Siemuszowa
This cemetery
looked nothing like the one in Llewellyn, Pennsylvania, near Minersville where
my Baba Julia and Gigi Mike were buried.
There the headstones were crowded together and the gravesites showed
traces of regular visits by family to care for them. Here at the old cemetery in Siemuszowa there were few
personal touches like flowers or candles and the headstones were randomly
spaced with a lot of room in between.
Probably other headstones crumbled long ago to leave these open spaces.
Down the hill, right next to the old wooden (formerly) Greek Catholic Church of the Transfiguration
of Our Lord was the new cemetery, which was well kept and full of fresh flowers
and burning memorial candles. This
church is now a Polish Catholic parish and its deceased members are buried nearby. Along with them were interred a few of
the former Ukrainian residents.
A year before my
visit here, I became very excited in the Spring of 2008 when I saw this notice
posted by Viktoria Pryadko in a PDF on the internet.
“Hello, dear friends!
I am looking for volunteers for my two work camps: in Holuczkow and Siemuszowa. They are starting very soon, but I don’t have enough people willing to go there… Could you spread the information about them among your friends, people that you know?... Or, of course, you can go for these work camps yourself … Work camps take place in the Polish mountains, in a very picturesque area, and concern renovating old cemeteries (with the help of professional stone-workers). The detailed description of the work camps is below.”
I followed up
with brief correspondence to the e-mail address listed, but did not find out
much. The person to whom I was
writing spoke limited English and my Polish was non-existent then. But, I looked forward to seeing the
results of this restoration effort.
A few years back, I had seen some photos of the old cemetery taken by my
cousin Maria Czerepaniak-Walczak on a visit there. It looked impassable and completely overgrown with wild
vegetation and many unpruned trees.
So when I
finally arrived at the old cemetery late on a Saturday afternoon in May 2009, I
was pleasantly surprised to see that the grounds were walkable and many of the
headstones were easy to read, although many were still indecipherable, with the
stone inscriptions fatigued from many years of exposure to the elements. The oldest remaining headstones showed
inscriptions from the early part of the 20th century for village
residents who were born as far back as 1836. And I did find a few of my own family: Czerepaniak; Hlib; Szwajlyk;
Charowsky. But there were no
Gburyk headstones to be found. I
was later told that my great-great-grandmother, Maria Gburyk, was buried with
Rozalia Hlib, who was her daughter Katarzyna’s mother-in-law. But, no evidence of my great grandfather
Andrej was to be found anywhere. I
did later determine that the headstone of a Tekla Buryk was actually that of
the wife of my great-great-uncle Joseph Gburyk.
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| Tekla Buryk (Gburyk) headstone in Siemuszowa cemetery |
I made a mental
note then to dig up information about whoever was responsible for bringing the
old cemetery in Siemuszowa back to life.
And so this spring 2011 I tried my usual Internet research tactics to
uncover a trail that would lead back to the restorers. Completely by chance, I found an e-mail
address for the Viktoria Pryadko who had posted the original PDF about
restoration work camps in Siemuszowa. Viktoria, a Ukrainian Lemko, was one of
the key volunteers in 2008 who helped to organize the other volunteers for the
work camps. After some correspondence back and forth, she pointed me to Ewa
Bryla (Bryła), the founder of the Minority Association of Carpathian Heritage
(SDMK is its abbreviation in Polish) based in Zagorze (Zagórze), Poland.
Dr. Ewa Bryla and her preservation work
Dr. Ewa Bryla, a
Ukrainian Lemko, is a professor at the Krakow University of Technology
Institute of Economics, Philosophy and Sociology where she works full
time. But, she maintains a
residence in Zagorze near Sanok.
Her mother, a member of the Bindas family, was from the small hamlet of
Laski (Łaski) near Tyrawa Woloska (Tyrawa Wołoska ) not far from
Siemuszowa. Her father was from
the village of Wolica near Bukowsko, which is south of Sanok.
Ewa became
interested in finding her roots in the Tyrawa valley area. She began by
contacting Walter Maksimovich the founder and owner of the Lemko.org web
site. Walter knew a man from
Tyrawa Woloska, Walter Zelwak. Walter Zelwak was interested in doing something
about the ruined conditioned of the Greek Catholic cemetery in his own
town. At first Ewa wasn’t sure she
could undertake such a project, but eventually decided to get involved. During the summer of 2004, she used her
vacation time and joined with some of her family and Walter’s relatives in an effort
to clean up this cemetery.
As she was cutting
through the thick brush, Ewa became upset by the conditions she witnessed. Why were the Greek Catholic cemeteries
allowed to fall into such a state of decay? She knew then that she wanted to preserve these cemeteries
and it would take more than a couple of local volunteers and a few extra zloty
to do this.
The next year
she formed SDMK as a non-profit in Poland. Szymon Modrzejewski, a stonemason who was also very active
in efforts to restore Lemko cemeteries as early as 1986 and had formed the Magurycz
Association in 2008, became involved in the early preservation work. He also
offered advice on how to obtain outside funding. During the summer of 2005, SDMK began its formal work in the
Tyrawa Woloska gmina (local community).
Assisting this effort were several organizations, local authorities and
volunteers. Also involved was
Ewa’s older brother Peter – a mechanic, builder, handyman and a self-taught
mason.
In 2007 after
receiving some additional funding, four cemeteries were restored in the Tyrawa
Woloska area including the Greek Catholic and Jewish ones, a well as the Greek
Catholic cemeteries in Krecow and Rozpucie. In 2008, restoration work took
place in the cemeteries of Siemuszowa, Holuczkow (Hołuczków) and Rakowa. In
2009, there was also renovation of historic and forgotten graves near the
church of St. Nicholas in Tyrawa Woloska and the local Roman Catholic parish
cemetery.
Further
renovations also took place in parallel in the foothills of Bukowsko (Pogorze
Bukowskie) region south of Sanok - the village of Plonna (Płonna) in the
municipality of Bukowsko, and in the Bieszczady Mountains the village of
Polyana in the municipality of Czarna. In Plonna were renovated three
cemeteries: near the old Greek
Catholic church parish and the old Roman Catholic church square. In addition to
repairing the Plonna Greek Catholic cemetery, renovation of the destroyed stone
church was started, in which the Communists had located storage for the nearby
PGR state farm.
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| Plonna cemetery Joan Klim restored headstone |
In 2010 SDMK
worked on cemeteries in the vicinity of the community Tyrawa Woloska in the
villages of Stankowa and Paszowa. In the meantime, other renovations took place
in the cemeteries of the villages Paniszczow and Izby near Uscie Gorlice and
Wola Sokolowa. Also individual graves were restored in the villages of Dewiatyr
and Nowe Selo in the county Lubaczow near the South Roztocze landscape park.
In 2011, SDMK
turned its efforts to Bukowsko and the villages of Karlikow, Przybyszow (Przybyszów)
and to Zagorz, where the headquarters of the Association was established. While
restoring cemeteries, SDMK also conducted workshops on the history of the area
and its multicultural past, which had evolved there over many hundreds of years
before the tragedy of Akcja Wisla.
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| Karlikow cemetery before restoration |
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| Karlikow cemetery during restoration |
Another activity
of the association is taking inventory of ruined churches in cooperation with
students at the Faculty of Architecture University of Technology in Krakow. As
of today, the churches were inventoried in 20 villages - from the Lower Beskid
Moutains, the Slonne (Słonne) Mountains and near the Bieszczady Mountains in
the vicinity of Roztocze.
And what has
been the reaction of the local inhabitants and the authorities to her various
restoration and inventory projects?
Ewa says the authorities responded favorably and granted permission for
her group to set up the work camps.
Their cooperation was crucial since the land of many of the old
cemeteries actually belongs to the gmina (local community). The villagers, who were naturally
reluctant at first and cool to outsiders coming into their communities and
uncovering and preserving some very painful memories, eventually became neutral
and ultimately friendly.
And what’s next?
For 2012-2013,
the group is considering a restoration project for the old Greek Catholic
cemetery in Tyrawa Solna ( (the village next to Siemuszowa), which dates back
some 200 years. The newer cemetery
is well maintained and sits next to St. John the Baptist church (now used by a
Roman Catholic parish which allows a Ukrainian Orthodox service to take place
once a month to accommodate the local community). Restoration of the old cemetery would include clearing some
brush and tree overgrowth as well as stone and ironwork. Ewa’s brother Peter now is in charge of
all restoration activity. She is
just beginning to secure funding for this project and welcomes any donations
and new sponsors.
If you would
like to learn more about SDMK and their very important work of preserving
cemeteries in the Lemko region of Poland, you can find out more here. http://dmk.witryna.org/index.php?wew=wstep
Dr. Bryla can be reached directly at: Stowarzyszenie Dziedzictwo Mniejszosci
Karpackich, ul. Filtrowa 19, 38-540 Zagórz , tel. 013 46 22 670, mniejszosci_karpackie@tlen.pl.
Mike Buryk is an Ukrainian-American
writer whose research focuses on Lemko and Ukrainian genealogy and the history
of Ukrainians in the United States. You can contact him at: michael.buryk@verizon.net. His web site is: http://www.buryk.com He wants to extend his special thanks
to Ewa Bryla for being interviewed for this article, to Ewa Charowska for assisting with the Polish translation
and to Volodya Cherepanyak for his technical assistance during the phone
interview. This article was first published
in The Ukrainian Weekly in 2012. http://www.ukrweekly.com/
Copyright (c) 2012-2013 by Michael J. Buryk. All Rights Reserved.
