Huta Samokleska was once a small self-sufficent Lemko village in the Carpathian Mountains of southeastern Poland that no longer exists today. The village was founded in the second half of the 1700's and was home to a mostly Lemko population for almost 200 years until the Communist government destroyed it in 1946 as part of their forced deportation of Lemkos to Ukraine. Huta, as it was sometimes referred to in the records and still is today by former residents and their descendants, was located in a deep mountain forest in the Lemkovyna region of Poland approximately ten miles from Poland's border in the Carpathians-- with Slovakia to the south.
Today the area of the village and a vast region of the surrounding mountain forest are included in Margurski National Park, one of Poland's largest national parks. The park was established in 1995 to preserve and protect the original natural beauty and wild life of these mountain areas where our ancestors once lived. Just two or three miles to the north and west of the former village location, outside the national park and in the broad valley adjacent to the base of the mountains, lie numerous other former Lemko villages that have survived time and Lemko deportations. Included among them are the other cluster villages described in this website: Folusz, Wola Cieklinska, Klopotnica and Pielgrzymka.
Huta was one of the smaller Lemko villages in the area and never had more than nineteen or twenty homes in its two centuries of existence. All that remains of the village today are ruins of the stone foundations of the homes, occasional stone-lined water wells and stone cold-cellars built into the hillsides. After the deportation, the local Communist government sold the homes in Huta to the remaining inhabitants of the valley below who used them for building-materials in the valley.
The village site and its ruins today are largely overgrown and concealed by the plants and trees of the now 50-year-old forest that has encroached on its territory. On a hike through the area, though, one can still find broken pottery, a small millstone where the local miller must have lived, and old cherry trees, forsythia bushes, and barwinek (myrtle groundcover) that the former residents must have planted around their homes. All of that is now swallowed up in the forest, but what remains is a lasting reminder that people with a 200-year-old history once lived there. The most noteworthy of the village ruins, and still standing, is a small chapel dedicated to the Blessed Mother, that was built by the Kityk family in 1893. The chapel was restored by local volunteers in 2000 and the work described in a Krakow newspaper.
While the other villages in the valley to the north of the mountains were primarily farming villages that came into existence at a much earlier time, Huta was founded in the mountains by the nobles who owned the land for the purpose of making glass. Those nobles earlier had founded the village of Samokleski, which is also located in the valley, a short distance to the east of Pielgrzymka. Hence, the village name, Huta Samokleska, suggests that it was derived from the word huta which is Polish for factory or foundry, and Samokleski, the village of its founders. The glass-making ceased by the early 1800's but some vestiges of the glass furnaces still remain as low mounds of dirt and rocks, long since blended into the forest. Occasional small stone fragments with a glass-like coating can still be found nearby to attest to that history.
Historical records indicated that the first inhabitants of Huta were experienced Germanized-Czech glass workers. They were induced to migrate there by the work and offers of owning some of the forest land cleared to provide wood from making charcoal fuel for the glass furnaces.
A.J. Smith