Some time ago, in a poor village in the mountains, there lived a Jew and a parish priest. One day, the Jewish man came to the clergyman and said, “Listen, we are both poor, why don’t we think about a way to make some money?” “How?” asked the priest, intrigued. “Let’s put a figure of the Virgin Mary into the well and people will believe that there was an apparition,” suggested the man. The priest embraced this idea, and they did just that. Not only did the village people believe in the apparitions, but the news start to spread, and with time the village became a popular destination of pilgrimages. As a result, both men prospered; the priest could collect generous donations and the Jewish inn enjoyed frequent visits. One day, the Jew was passing next to the well where two pilgrims were talking while having a rest. “I’m won- dering whether this water is really helpful?” one of them pondered.
“Oh yes, I know at least two men whom this water definitely helped,”
replied the Jew with a smile.
After Metody told me this story, I asked him, still laughing, whether it was an anecdote about one of the neighboring pilgrimage sites where there is indeed a mountain with a well and “holy water” and where the Greek Catholics and Orthodox continue to commemo- rate apparitions. According to local legend, Mary appeared there to a pious woman and asked her to build a chapel. My storyteller, a cheerful elderly man with a constant smile on his face, answered that he could not reveal the location but that he was convinced there was a grain of truth in the story. Having said that, Metody went back to his work. He had come to the house I was renting in order to fix a broken door lock. Thanks to a fully equipped toolbox and Metody’s
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years of experience as a watchmaker, the task was soon completed and we could sit in the kitchen over a cup of a hot tea. I asked him how much I owed him for his work, which I appreciated all the more given the raging snowstorm outside. “I cannot take any money from you,” Metody replied. “It is Friday evening. I celebrate Saturdays, and Friday evening counts as Saturday. So if I work, I do it free of charge, only to help others,” he added with a smile.
Metody was born into a mixed family; his mother was Rusyn and his father was Polish. He used to be a Pentecostal, then he joined the Seventh-day Adventists for a time, and now he does not belong to any religious community. He just reads the Bible, or, to be more precise, various bibles. He has the classical Roman Catholic translation,1 which he got as a gift from a close friend, a Roman Catholic priest, as well as the versions used by the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Pentecostals. He always spoke to me with great interest about the differences he finds in the various editions and shared with me his knowledge about the different traditions. Living in a district inhabited by seven religious communities, he has a unique opportunity to confront the theory with practice.
In their everyday lives, people like Metody prove that just as there are numerous translations and understandings of the Bible, so are there many ways of being Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant, a Lemko or/and a Pole. Their lives and the stories they tell convey a nuanced picture of irony towards religious beliefs, the fluidity of religious boundaries and religious identities, the rich diversity of interpretations of historical events, and the continuous process by which boundar- ies shift. As in Metody’s story, some religious alliances prove useful in one context, while inimical in another. Two religious groups may compete over the faithful, but given the presence of a third group, they are likely to join forces (even if only temporarily). Shifts in reli- gious identification occur frequently and, along with “spiritual” rea- sons, people refer to more earthly motivations for conversion: one’s decision could be prompted by a dream with a message from above or something as a simple as wanting a church that is closer to one’s home.
But such attitudes coexist with a deep preoccupation with one’s religious creed, with how boundaries and identities become fixed and rigid, and with the means whereby certain narratives and inter- pretations become dominant and exclusive. Although the meaning of “other” and the definitions of “us” and “them” vary, at the end of the day certain boundaries remain resilient, and thus the price of
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one’s conversion can be very high. The realm of Rozstaje is far from a “religious market” in which individuals freely choose their religious identifications (cf. Pelkmans 2009). The high number of religious conversions should obscure neither the various constraints that the inhabitants face, such as pressures from one’s family and/or the long, complicated history of the ethnic communities in the region, nor the hierarchy that still characterizes local pluralism.
Narratives of local history encapsulate all these processes, eluci- dating why certain practices produce boundaries that are alternately
“bright” and “blurred” (Alba 2005). Metody’s story is a good example of this. The story is part of the regional folklore and a remembrance of the past sociocultural landscape—a landscape that disappeared after World War II.2 Piecing together this history through the accounts of local people, reveals not only the plurality of voices but also their inherently heteroglossic character. I refer to Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), for whom the concept of heteroglossia is crucial for comprehending the social life of language. His understanding of heteroglossia means much more than acknowledging the multiplicity of voices and the competing views of the world contained therein; he also highlights the connections between people’s speaking (1981:263). In Bakhtin’s view, people always, consciously or not, refer to the words, opinions, and views of others, which makes each utterance dialogical (1981:280).
This point is particularly relevant when inquiring into whether and how the interconnectedness of speech crosses social boundaries.
Further, Bakhtin’s findings are helpful in analyzing the hierarchy of speakers and speeches. His reflections on the “authoritative utter- ance” (1986:88)—a dominant narrative represented by a powerful group or individual—invites us to consider how such authoritative voices shape other people’s views of the past and to what extent het- eroglossic narratives can be understood as a strategy of contestation.
Given my interest in the multivocality of local narratives and the very practice of “story-telling,” I adhere to James Young’s proposal (1993) to speak about “collected” rather than “collective memory.”3 I also contend that understanding the role of religion in the process of storytelling and memory-collecting demands more than recognizing the connection between religion and cultural memory or tradition (Assmann 2006: Hervieu-Léger 2000).4 Pointing to different ways in which lived religion influences memory “work,”5 permits us to approach religious practices and identities as habitual and strategic, and thus pivotal in both reproducing and refashioning memories for current purposes.
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Caroling history
The day of January 7, 2009, is sunny and freezing. The village of Krasne is completely covered by snow: the roofs of wooden houses are laden with snowdrifts and the windows are decorated with rime-made ornaments. It is hard to spot a human being on the narrow roads that, at this point, look more like tunnels than streets. The only sign that people are present is the smoke coming from the chimneys and a few inhabitants going to visit their neighbors. When I arrive at the house of Hanna and Henek, I am welcomed by the latter, clearing snow.
Upon my arrival, he leans on the shovel and indicates a parking spot in the corner of the plot. “You won’t have a chance to go back this night anyway, believe me,” he explains, amused. I enter the house and find the rest of the family in the warm kitchen. We gathered only the day before, as the family had invited me to spend the Orthodox Christmas Eve with them (see Chapter 5). Hanna hurries to prepare a cup of tea, while her twenty-years old daughter, Hela, urges me to try some Christmas sweets. While all three of us warm ourselves leaning against the kitchen stove, the grandmother rummages in the wardrobe, looking for traditional scarves that Hela and I could use this afternoon. An hour later, we are fully prepared; in long patterned skirts and sheepskin coats, with colorful bandanas covering our heads and gaudy makeup on our faces, we go to one of the neighboring houses to join the group of carol singers. We are supposed to be Gypsy6 fortune-tellers, traditional figures in the local folklore. Hela’s brother, dressed up as a shepherd, joins us, and we walk together along the snowy paths.
We gather at the house of the Orthodox priest. He is absent, but he has let his son host the young people at the presbytery. Initially, there are eleven of us: Gypsies, shepherds, an angel, a devil, K ing Herod, and a Jew. Most of the people belong to the Orthodox parish of Krasne, but there are also some members of the Greek Catholic and Roman Catholic communities from the neighbor- ing villages. Hela, the main organizer of the event, distributes sheets with the words to several carols. They are in the Lemko language, written in Latin characters; this allows those unfamil- iar with Cyrillic to learn the words easily. We have a brief music lesson, trying to learn the melody and to avoid singing off-key.
Afterwards, Hela transforms herself into a theater director and makes her friends perform a short play about the birth of Jesus.
The performance is quite humorous; it is about the biblical K ing Herod who wants to capture Jesus, but is stopped by the joint
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forces of the angel and the devil. We have a lot of fun, dressing up, trying handmade instruments (such as a can with beans) and practicing the play. When the last people join, we decide to leave;
we are aware that it is going to be a long evening.
We have twenty houses to visit and we decide to start at the very end of the village. First, we walk on the asphalt road and are greeted by the passengers of a few cars passing through the village. Later, we have no choice but to walk through the high snow, including when we arrive at our first destination, the old wooden dwelling of Wasyl, situated next to a large sawmill.
Before we enter his house, I shall say a few words about the host. Wasyl was born in 1932 into a Greek Catholic family. He had four siblings, and he lost his father as a little boy. Like most of the Rusyn population, he was resettled in Western Poland (1947), where he learned to do woodwork, served in the army, and married an Orthodox girl. They came back to Krasne in 1956. Today, Wasyl is a widower and lives with an unmarried son, while his other children and grandchildren live in neighboring villages. Without telling his family, he has been writing the story of the entire clan, starting with the day of his parents’ marriage. At the time of our last conversation, he had written forty pages and had not even reached the postwar period yet. His chronicle will no doubt be fascinating, as Wasyl is a
Figure 3.1 Carol singers, dressed up as traditional folk figures. Photo: Agnieszka Pasieka
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great storyteller: he remembers the tiniest details of the village’s his- tory, and he presents them in a colorful way.
Although he was a small child at the time, he remembers the prewar years very well. He depicts them as a period when people respected and helped each other. Most of the inhabitants were Greek Catholics, and the few Poles who lived in the village attended Greek Catholic religious services, too. Indeed, joint attendance of reli- gious services was the main reason why Roman Catholic Poles were included in the local community; the boundary between them and the locals quickly blurred. Wasyl also recalls that people were very sociable and after the work of the day was completed, they would gather in one of the houses to play instruments and sing. The reli- gious and work calendars were connected; most parish festivities and religious festivals took place in the autumn, once the main work in the field was finished. Despite the poor quality of the soil, people cultivated lots of land. As Wasyl recalls, people were very industrious and did their best to make a living. He emphasizes that they loved their land and their forests; he even claims that the inhabitants used to give personal names to every tree they owned. Similarly, many parts of the village used to have a separate name, such as Kowalowe (“of the forger”) or Liskowe (“of the fox”). In Wasyl’s narratives, as in numerous other Lemkos’, the prewar period is presented as an idyl- lic time, made even more so when contrasted with the tragic events that followed.
Wasyl gets very emotional when he recounts the dramatic events of his family history. He is also very moved when he sees our group—
wet and frozen, but laughing and singing loudly. Wasyl and his son invite us into the kitchen and they both remain standing while the actors give a humorous performance of a part of the story of Jesus’s birth. In the end, Hela the Gypsy approaches Wasyl’s son and, look- ing into her magic ball, foretells his wedding in the forthcoming spring, which all those gathered welcome with a burst of laughter: the
“groom” in question is known as a confirmed bachelor who expresses neither the hope nor the desire to marry. Next, Bartek who plays a Jew gets closer to the hosts and tries to do business with them; he pulls out various small objects from his leather bag and encourages the men to buy them. This game is intended to invite the hosts to make a donation; the hosts enter into the game, try to negotiate the price, question the value of the offered objects, and eventually make a generous donation.
The presence of Jews in the play is a reference not only to a common folk representation but also to the region’s history. Wasyl remembers
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the Jews who used to live in Krasne before Second World War. He recalls three Jewish families and remembers that one of the Jews had a shop and that another ran an inn. They were rich enough to be able to afford maids who worked for them on the Sabbath. Above all, the Jews are remembered as the ones who “prayed so so much.”
Although people observed Jews praying, they did not understand or attempt to understand their practices; the religious boundary was very clear and there was no wish to transgress it. Not only Wasyl, but most of the old inhabitants assert that the Jews lived well, like the rest of the village population, and they were respected. Yet, they also recall that many women were angry with the Jews for turning their men into drunkards by selling them alcohol on credit. Some people claim that the practice was not widespread, while others tell of men who drank away the lands they owned. Such accounts, and the performance during the carol singing described above, account for the archetypal image of the Jews as shopkeepers who did not always make honest offers (cf. Cała 2005). At the same time, the ambivalent picture of prewar relations with Jews point to nostalgia’s role in recasting relations that were merely “neutral” as “positive” or
“exemplary.”
Other similarities with traditional folk representations are accounts of Jewish wisdom and the Jews’ capacity to predict the future: “One Jew said to my father: they will start [the killing] with us and they will finish with you.”7 Further, accounts of the Jews’ mysterious powers are a pattern in morality tales. Wasyl remembers, for instance, that after the Jews were carried away by the Nazi occupiers, the inn was dismantled for wood. After the war, a man built a house at the place where the inn used to be, but he was unhappy; he, his children, and grandchildren always complained that it was not a fortunate place.
The idea of “haunted land” and building one’s life on somebody’s tragedy is a recurrent theme in the local narratives.
Before we leave the first house, Wasyl’s son serves each of us a glass of sweet red wine. He asks which other houses we are going to visit.
The young people explain that we plan to visit the houses of Greek Catholics and Orthodox who celebrate Christmas at this time. Here, it is important to mention that the Jews were not the only “others”
who lived in the region before World War II. Some of Wasyl’s relatives and also his neighbors are Pentecostals. I recall their history with the words of one of the present pastors, Michał, who settled in the region only in the 1980s and learnt the local history from the old- est Pentecostals. The Protestant movement came to the region with returnee migrants (in the 1930s) and in 1936 split into “Baptists” and
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so-called researchers of the Gospel, who then became Pentecostals.
The latter’s “myth of origins” dates back to the outbreak of war:
. . . a miracle happened in 1939. At that time, Protestant prayers were already said in N. and the news about them were spreading . . . One Sunday, some Lemkos decided to go there, out of curiosity. On the way back, three women were visited by the Spirit and started to speak in different languages ( . . . ) [Soon] all the Lemko land was inflamed with the word of the Gospel.
Michał claims that even the outbreak of the war did not prevent the development of Pentecostalism. People used to meet at night in the forests and spread the Gospel from village to village. He even recalls the day when German soldiers entered a house where Pentecostals were praying and attempted to arrest them, but the Holy Spirit came to a woman. She started to speak German and apparently convinced the soldiers that they should leave the community in peace (she said:
“Baptists gut!”). In general, the Pentecostals’ stories are filled with accounts of miracles and people’s ability to speak different languages (which makes them, indeed, heteroglossic). Michał’s narratives are distinctive in their heterogeneity; in addition to transcendental inter- pretations, he also provided very down-to-earth explanations, which, in his view, did not contradict the more spiritual narratives:
[In the interwar period] there was a . . . religious war here, you know . . . Lemkos are not saints! [ . . . ] As you might know, the Catholic Church battled regularly with the Orthodox one. It was a total war.
And suddenly, in the 1930s, in the midst of the Orthodox-Catholic battle, a vibrant, well-organized Protestant community sprang up, attacking both those churches . . . So those two fighting churches had to join forces and start to battle with the Protestant one. And they speculated, and used Protestants in their own struggle [ . . . ] It was a dirty struggle, very dirty struggle. They would stop at nothing.
Such accounts challenge more idyllic pictures of the prewar period, such as the one presented by Wasyl. In order to understand the foun- dation of idyllic narratives, we need to shed light on the events of the war and its aftermath.
During the Second World War, the region was under Nazi occu- pation until the Soviets arrived in 1944. Inhabitants’ accounts of the war period are very diverse. Many of the people I spoke to claimed that the war was not particularly felt in the village. They mention obligatory work, like digging trenches and food restrictions, but