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[ View the Fotopage entry | View the complete Fotopage ]
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[ View the Fotopage entry | View the complete Fotopage ]
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| Wednesday, 8-Mar-2006 03:57 |
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Ukrainian Carpathians 2: Trip to Kosmach to Buy a Tsymbaly
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Here are some pictures again from the summer of 2004. In the post below, I mentioned my friend Anna, who is originally from the village of Jabloniv not far from the town of Kolomyja in the state of Ivano-Frankivsk. Part of her family is of Hutsul descent, and her father is a musician. I wanted to buy a real Hutsul-style tsymbaly, and he had a way to help. After a day of recovering from the weekend long wedding I mentioned in the last post, we headed on the highway from Jabloniv up into the mountains to the large village or small town of Kosmach. Vasyl, Anna's father, knew of a master tsymbalyst there who had a tsymbaly for sale. Jabloniv is right at the base of the mountains, while Kosmach is in a high mountain valley just over the crest of the first of the Carpathian ridges. It was an incredible ride up the mountain. The highway was nothing more than a tiny, potholed, single lane affair without much of a shoulder, etc. Vasyl had a local friend that was a Marshrutka driver, and so we agreed to rent the thing for the day (the buddy was not working that day). Altogether, we were Anna and her boyfriend Petro, Anna's friend Oksana from Kyiv, me, and my second-cousin Oksana, and Vasyl. Petro, Anna, and I paid for the minibus as we all live in the West and make Western wages or live off of Western study grants (Petro is from Kyiv but is a Canadian citizen, and Anna is a student in Toronto).
Our first stop up the mountain was at a natural spring that also bubbles up oil. The Carpathians once had a fair bit of oil, but the Nazis pumped quite a bit of it out they say, and they say that there isn't enough left to bother. As oil and water seperate, people fill up with water here. The driver-friend insisted that the water was full of minerals that were good for our health. Nonetheless, I declined to drink any; in general I prefer to do things as Ukrainians do while in Ukraine, but I will not drink the local water anymore, unless it is boiled in coffee or tea, or in some soup. Been sick too many times, and I am weary of getting girardia again--I had it once many years ago, long before coming to Ukraine, as result of a backpacking trip. JFYI, it is imposible to avoid the water 100%, and it is also not necessary; for drinking water you can just go for bottled stuff (both with and without gas are widely available) or you can bring your own filter, iodine, or boil all your own (but these latter three approaches are not very practical. . .).
We made another stop to quickly look at the view as we approached Kosmach, and when we got to Kosmach, Vasyl dropped us off at the local bar, where he said we would have to wait for him while he went off looking for the tsymbalyst. That turned into a two or three hour wait. None of us felt like drinking, as we had had plenty to drink over the prior two days, so instead we drank coffee and tea, slept, and some of us went for a walk around town.
Finally, Vasyl came back to announce that he had found the tsymbalyst, and as he made his announcement he flicked his throat (which meant that the tsymbalyst was drunk). Shortly thereafter a car came zooming down the road and pulled in front of the bar. Out of the car stumbled a guy who introduced himself as someone who had a tsymbaly for sale. There were a couple of other guys in the car, and they told us we should follow them to the local cultural center (narodnyj dim).
The other two guys in the car were a town doctor and an accordion player who had keys to the center. The doctor was carrying a mineral water bottle that was full of samohonka, or moonshine spirits, and they had some buderbrode (open-faced sandwhiches) with them as well. They lugged the heavy tsymably into a room in the center, and the maestro said something like, "Well, to buy it, you should hear someone play it first." So he started playing. Oh, but before that we had had to drink a few shots.
Vasyl started to cajole Anna and I to dance; that is, I have already enjoyed my fifteen minutes of fame because I was the American with Ukrainian roots who danced an arkan almost flawlessly, in the real way, with real Hutsuls, and who had done lots of other Hutsul-styled couples dancing at the wedding the previous two days. So Vasyl wanted to show me off to his musician buddies. So Anna and I danced. This got the accordion player to join in the playing, and we had our own little Central European tanzhaus going for a while.
The town doctor--the most sloshed of all present--got so thrilled that he first shuved the slivjanka bottle into my hand, and then draped a Hutsul vest over me, after which the accordionist held up a pair of traditional pants against me. It was all a surreal and incredible experience.
After some more eating, drinking, dancing and playing, the maestro (who, btw, had just won some major tsymbaly competition in Kyiv) and I concluded our deal. He then told me that I could return for two weeks of free lessons. He also said that he regularly teaches a month long seminar on tsymbaly at the end of every summer. The doctor told me that he would put me up in a room in the hospital if I were to return. Unfortunately, I never managed to return, though the desire to do so is still very much present within me.
So we then headed back down the mountain at the end of the day. It was an incredible afternoon to evening. (And I remember that the nighttime that followed was a downer by comparison; we watched Lost in Translation which Petro had on his laptop--most of us thought it was stupid, as it took the entire length of the film to finally, actually get started, at which point it ended . . .)
Update: by the way, we loaded my newly-purchased, heavy-ass tsymbaly into our rented Marshrutka and brought it back down to Jabloniv, where I left it with Vasyl with the promise of returning at some point with a car from Pidhajtsi (Oksana and I could not imagine lugging that thing on a packed Marshrutka first to Kolomyja, and then on to Pidhajtsi). It ended up taking me a few months to return and pick it up, not the least because some revolutionary upheavals in the country distracted me into other adventures. That tsymbaly is still in Pidhajtsi, where another tsymbalyst, a Lemko master player, has also offered me lessons. (The county of Pidhajtsi is one of the areas in which Lemkos, deported in the late 1940s from their Carpathian homelands on the Polish side of the border, ended up...)
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