| Wednesday, 8-Mar-2006 20:16 |
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Ukrainian Carpathians 3: Sheshory 2005
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One day last summer while I was visiting with Anna and her family again for a couple of days back in Jabloniv, Anna and I were bored and so decided to go to Sheshory. There is a very touristy restaurant there called, you guessed it, "Arkan," that she wanted to show me. The road to Sheshory breaks off the main highway between Kolomyja and Kosiv about halfway, so we hitched a ride to that spot and then walked the few kilometers the rest of the way to Sheshory, passing through some other villages along the way. This was last September, and you can see how rainy it still was. It rains and rains all summer in the Carpathians, or at least in this part of them. The mountains you see here are just the front ranges of the Carpathians, while Sheshory is right at the base of the front range.
When we got to the restaurant, Anna was a bit dismayed to see that the band playing was that of some colleagues of her father's--I guess she wanted to be anonymous there, mostly because she had been there a month earlier with her boyfriend Petro, and now she was there with me!? Village life and gossip--it is still very unusual for men and women to be friends, particularly in Ukrainian villages. Or rather, it is mostly rare for a male and female who are friends to hang out one-on-one rather than in a group of their peers. Everything we were doing looked like a date to the eyes of an older generation. . .
I recognized the lead violinist of the band as the best virtuoso player I have yet seen in the region. He is a quite unusual fellow, hard to follow in conversation. He recognized Anna. At the restaurant, the musicians move from table to table, at each of which they will play a few tunes in return for which they, of course, expect money. At the restaurant, they don't play in the authentic village style, of course, but rather in the "bourgeoified" style of most dance and music troupes that people today confuse for real folk music (they play at the restaurant in what we authenticity-enthusiasts in the Ethnic Dance Theater call the "Sovietski Bullshitski" style). That is, the music and dance you see and hear most of the time at diaspora concerts and hear on most so-called folk music CDs is "prettified" (by ballet and too much music training) for presentation on the stage or the CD; i.e., it's quite removed from the real thing. This area is a popular retreat place for urban Ukrainians who themselves also don't know the authentic Hutsul village style. One of the musicians told us that a Kyiv byznesman once dropped on them a $100 bill! At any rate, this troupe can play in the authentic style as well, as I heard them do so a year prior, in the summer of 2004, at the Kosiv Ivana Kupala festival. Again, once I get my videoblog going, I will post both their performance at the festival and here at the restaurant.
Anyhow, this violinist started doing some antics while playing for us, as he recognized Anna. I should have photographed him as he sat in a chair close to Anna and placed his violin bow between his legs in an erect, phallic manner while continuing to play the violin and starting to chant, in rhythm to the music, some pretty raunchy stuff. Anna blushed, we paid them some money, and they moved on to another table. I finished my 300g flask of horylka (was a bit in a drinkin mood, as I often am while in Ukraine!), she her wine, and we then started to walk up the road to the highway in the dark until we were lucky enough to get picked up by the last run of a local Marshrutka heading toward Kolomyja, and hence in the direction of her village.
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