The Journey of a Lifetime

I was at a point in my life where it was time to get my travel priorities straight. I didn't want to go on a vacation anywhere in the world, sit on another beach or see another cathedral until I had the chance to go to my ancestral homeland of Pielgrzymka/Peregrymka. To me it was a magical place that I just had to see. Lemkoland was my Disneyland. After trying to get other people together to make the trip and trying to get on other trips that all fell apart I realized that if I wanted to get there with my mother (referred to as Baba), who was then age 89, I just had to make reservations and do it!

My decision was made easier because my cousin, Paul Yurkosky, was there in 1999. He said Poland is beautiful and it is very easy to get around there. Yes, Poland was beautiful and it was easy to get around, but we had another goal in mind for this trip. We wanted to meet the other half of my mother's father's family who once lived in Pielgrzymka but was forced to move to Ukraine in 1945. A second cousin (once removed) convinced me that the family in Ukraine had plenty of room for us to stay with them, they would take good care of us and we should go to Ukraine as well. Ukraine is not as easy a country to go to as Poland but we obtained the necessary visas and were ready to go.

The day came when we were to leave from Newark Airport headed for Lviv, Ukraine with a stop in Warsaw. As my brother drove us to the airport I couldn't believe we were really doing this - me and my mother going to Ukraine by ourselves. I was beginning to think this was a crazy idea, as my husband kept telling me, but my excitement quickly drove away my fear.

Landing in Lviv was like landing in a third-world airport. It was very hot that August day in 2001, the wait to go through customs was several hours and of course there was no air conditioning. Once we finally got through to the other side of the wall we no longer felt like we were going to the Ukraine by ourselves. 12 beautiful Yurkowsky relatives with bouquets of flowers met us. No introductions were needed; we knew each other just by looking at our faces. One relative spoke some English, but Baba didn't need a translator, she was able to communicate with them perfectly in whatever language it was that her father came to America with. What a heartwarming experience. I felt like we were in a movie.

After taking some pictures with the family they loaded up our luggage in the three cars that they came in and we were all off to Ivano Frankovsk for the first of many family dinners to come. This one was in the apartment of my second cousin and his family. The table was full of beautifully presented food, vodka, wine, and the faces of curious family members who just couldn't wait to get acquainted. The enormity of the gathering was really overwhelming. This Yurkowsky family was severed in 1907 when my grandfather left Pielgrzymka to come to America. 94 years later this family was rejoined and broke bread together. Baba met five first cousins on this trip. Two of her cousins and their grandchildren came on a 24-hour train ride from Donetsk, near Kiev, to meet us. Her cousins all stuck by her side like glue. They spoke to each other and sang songs as if they grew up together.

With phone calls being made we were whisked off to the next home in Kolomya, about an hour further south. This is the home where we stayed for the next three nights. It was a beautiful two-family home (side by side) of my mother's first cousin, Stefan and his family. It was filled with even more Yurkowsky relatives who had been busy preparing for another party. By this time it was 11:00 PM Ukrainian time but still the table was filled with a beautiful display of so much food, and of course more vodka and wine. There were lots of toasts to our newly met relatives and to our relatives in heaven who we were certain were looking down upon this union with happy hearts and tears in their eyes. After speeches and introductions there was singing. After the singing we had dessert outside on the patio at around 2:00 AM. What a day!

With a cock-a-doodle-do we were awakened the next morning by the family rooster. The day was bright and sunny and the relatives arrived early to the house where we were staying, ready for a full day of sightseeing. Our first stop of the day was a gift shop in the town of Kolomya where our relatives insisted we pick out gifts to take home with us. They said we just had to have two embroidered cloths for my daughters for when they get married, matrushki dolls, hand-carved wooden boxes and eggs, pysanky, icons, etc. Next we visited the Hutsul Museum where my mother's first cousin Olga was a curator for over 20 years. After that it was on to the Pysanky Museum which Aunt Olga co-founded. It's a two story building in the shape of an Easter eggs all beautifully painted inside and out. Inside was a huge collection of pysanky. By now our family group was up to about 25. They were keeping in touch with each other by cell phones. Then it was Aunt Olga's turn to host us for a meal. We all went up to her apartment for lunch - which was like a dinner. Again there was lots of eating, drinking, singing and conversation. Olga pulled out her box of family history but we didn't have any time to look through. I really regret that now.

No trip to meet family would be complete without a visit to the cemeteries to honor our departed family members. You have to picture 25 people from age 2 to 89 traipsing through three cemeteries and singing "Memory Eternal" in both Russian and English at each grave of our ancestors. It felt like a Russian Godfather movie. I loved how most of the graves had pictures of the deceased on the stones. It was like meeting them even though they were gone.

It had been a long day already, but now it was time for dinner. We began our feast with champagne at the house of Peter Kania, the widower of Baba's first cousin Emelia Olenich Kania. In his house were icons that were brought from their homestead in Pielgrzymka. From there we went to Peter's daughter's house around the corner for dinner. Galina, her husband and son have an enormous, beautiful, brand new house equipped with washing machine, computer, dishwasher, etc. Her dining room sat all of us very comfortably. Again, lots of food, including potato pancakes. It was at this house that another of Baba's first cousins, Wasyl, serenaded us with Evening Bells in Russian and O Solo Mio in Russian! He has a wonderful tenor voice. Wasyl is one of the cousins who came to meets us from Donetsk. It was time to call it a night. On the way out I noticed in Galina's basement that she had mushrooms drying over a stove. She had a new house but it was filled with old customs.

The next day was bright and sunny again and all of the relatives again met us ready to take off on our journey up to the mountains. We went to a village called Yaremche, which is at the peak of the Carpathian Mountains in the Ukraine. It is a resort village with a river and beautiful waterfall. When we got to the river most of the group, young and old, went swimming.

After a day of enjoying the mountains we were on our way to dinner at the home of my second cousin in Obertin, a town near Ivano Frankovsk. The scenery was beautiful along the way with rolling hills, farms and many stork nests in the streetlights. Except for the storks, it looked very much like Eastern Pennsylvania. The Mizeraks met us at the door dressed in full Lemko costume from Pielgrzymka, holding an embroidered cloth with bread and salt - a traditional Lemko welcome. What a beautiful sight. Baba and I felt like we were dreaming. Could all of this really be happening? It was all surreal. Once more a huge dinner table filled with an artistically arranged feast, more toasts and song. Before dessert we went for a walk down the dirt road past the chickens, ducks and cows to a neighbor who was from Pielgrzymka also. We even passed a neighbor carrying a huge cake from her house to ours for dessert. What a wonderful strong singing voice she had! We visited another cemetery here in Obertin where another of my mother's first cousin's is buried. It was my daughter's birthday at home and the family insisted that we call her to sing God Grant You Many Years. The warmth, hospitality and generosity of our Ukrainian family were completely overwhelming. It felt like we had known them for a lifetime. We could have come home from our trip at this point feeling completely fulfilled, but there was more to come!

The day arrived when we were to leave Ukraine and head to Poland. My second cousin, Slava and his beautiful wife Donna, drove us to Poland. On the way we stopped in Lviv to pick up a box of gifts for the family that didn't make it to Lviv airport with us, but was delivered from Warsaw in the meantime. We were also scheduled for one last meal together with another second cousin, who lived in Lviv, but he had car trouble and we couldn't wait any longer to get on our way to Poland. The border crossing was quite an experience. There was an unbelievable long line of cars. They said it would take about 6 hours to get across. After waiting about 1 ½ hours in the hot sun Donna talked to one of the guards about Baba being 89 years old and feeling a bit faint, flashed her eyelashes at him and they let us go to the front of the line. There was still a long wait for the guards to look through the car and check our passports before we got across, but we saved a few hours.

Once in Poland we met Iwona at the Hotel Gromada in Przemysl. Iwona is my Polish genealogist and for this trip our guide. Przemysl is a city in Poland located near the boarder of Ukraine. I highly recommend the Hotel Gromada. It was very beautiful and very inexpensive. We explored the city and its castle, had dinner and the next day we were ready to head to Peregrymka. On the way we stopped at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral and home of Bishop Adam in Sanok and went to the Icon Museum there. After a quick stop at Hotel Europa in Jaslo, where we would be staying during our time visiting Pielgrzymka, we excitedly headed out to Pielgrzymka. I couldn't wait to see that name on a sign.

We first found the home of Eugene, the president of the Pielgrzymka church. He was expecting us because we had corresponded prior to our visit. He made our visit to Pielgrzymka very informative and enjoyable. First of all he holds the key to the church - and what a key it is - about a foot long!!! He also arranged to have the priest have a Divine Liturgy at St. Michael's on Sunday instead of going to Sanok to celebrate their church's 75th anniversary. Eugene introduced us to Mrs. Pawlack, a long time resident of Pielgrzymka who was not forced out of the village in 1945 when most everyone else was. She came for a ride in the car with us to point out where the last of our ancestors lived.

The next day was Sunday and we went to the church of St. Michael the Archangel in Pielgrzymka for Liturgy. This was the highlight of our entire trip. My mother walked into the church, arm in arm, with her cousin's son, Slava who drove us to Pielgrzymka. That was pretty remarkable that these two separated families, 94 years later, returned to the church together, in the homeland of their mutual ancestors. You could feel the presence of generations of Yurkowsky ancestors who had gathered in that church for generations to experience the most happy and most sad times of their lives, and everything in between. This little wooden church had been the site of so much of our family's history. To me it was a miracle that it still stood there ready to provide us with the Body and Blood of Christ. Unbelievable - too great a feeling for words.

The church was a small wooden church with pews. It had a very ornate iconostas that looked very much like the one at St. John the Baptist R.O. Church in Mayfield, Pennsylvania. The singing was different from what I am used to. It was more of a chant, but I recognized it as being like that in the churches of the Carpatho-Russian diocese. The priest invited us to go behind the altar to see the miraculous icon of the Virgin Mary from about 1609. We heard the history of the church in detail by Eugene, translated by Iwona, which I video taped. The priest asked the entire congregation to stay for a photograph with us after Liturgy.

Eugene took us to his house for dinner and then on a tour of the Pielgrzymka cemetery, and the neighboring villages of Klopotnica, Wola Cieklinska and Folush where other ancestors of ours had once lived. At the cemetery we found several Yurkowsky headstones, two of them with bullet holes and one with the bullet still in the stone. One of the Yurkowsky graves was overgrown with wild roses and we went back there the next day with clippers to clean it up. There was a heavy groundcover of weeds throughout the entire the cemetery which was probably hiding some fallen stones. We never did find the gravestones of mother's grandparents, even though we knew where they should have stood.

While driving to the village of Wola Cieklinska Eugene and Baba sang songs in the car. It was such a pleasant day. Wola Cieklinska is where several of my ancestors came from, including my maternal grandmother, Efrosenia. Wola Cieklinska had its own church, St. Demetrius, at one time but it was knocked down. We did visit their cemetery which is next to where the church once stood. Many familiar names were found on the tombstones in the Wola Cieklinska cemetery.

While in Wola Cieklinska we visited with Mrs. Klemash and her son at house #30. This house was built in 1893 and except for it having a metal roof instead of a thatched roof; it is exactly like all of the houses were there hundreds of years ago. The people lived in one room on one side of the house, and the animals lived on the other side of the house. There was a hallway and door between them. They were very gracious and offered us food and coffee. They brought out pictures and letters from their family in the US. Baba knew some of the people in the pictures from Wilkes Barre.

Our next stop was Klopotnica. That is where my Dubowchik and Guzy grandparents came from. People from this village went to St. Michael's church in Pielgrzymka. I saw where one of my Olenich great-grandparents had a mill on the Klopotnica River. We visited with one family there whose grandchildren were altar boys at church that morning. Again, these people were very hospitable. They also had letters and pictures of relatives from the US who we knew.

We also drove through Folush, a forested area. There we stopped in a grove of white birch trees (bereoska trees) so that Baba could hug a birch tree - to get strength. She's still alive and very healthy and strong today at age 92, so maybe Eugene knew what he was talking about!

The next day our first stop was the archives office in Osiek to meet up with Mrs. Ropa. She gave us a little bit of a hard time, but we got the books out of her hands finally and were able to view them and take some notes. We found some information, but I know I have to go back and look through those books myself, line by line. It was time to return to Peregrymka to spend time on our Yurkowsky land. When Baba stood in the middle of the field she held her hands up to the sky and cried out "Grandpa I'm here!" It was very moving. She picked and ate an apple from an old tree that she figured her grandfather must have planted. We took some dirt, wildflowers and rocks home from grandfather's land to share with the family. We then returned to the cemetery to clean up the overgrown grave, stopped to say goodbye to Eugene and his wife and to thank them for their hospitality and left our dear Peregrymka. I hated to leave Peregrymka and knew I would have to return there again when I could spend more time.

One last stop in that area was to the archives office in Debowic where the archives for Wola Cieklinska and Folush were housed.

It was a beautiful ride to Gorlice to see the town and visit the newly renovated Orthodox Church there. It has the most exquisite interior painting in beautiful shades of green, purple and blue. The priest from Pielgrzymka lives here and is the pastor here, as well as Pielgrzymka and three other Orthodox churches.

Our next stop was Wieliczka where we had dinner and stayed for the night. In the morning we went to the famous Salt Mines of Wieliczka and had a private tour. These salt mines even have a church deep underground carved out of salt. From there we visited the city of Krakow and did some shopping before our flight home.

What incredible memories we brought home with us. It was a dream that came true and keeps coming back to enchant us. The people we met in Poland and Ukraine will never leave our hearts. We are a family unit once again, praying for each other, caring about each other, sharing in the joy of happy times and mourning together the loss of loved ones.

We did not know this prior to our departure for Europe, but this was not a vacation, not a trip - it was a journey to unite the soul of a family unit that was severed, and make it whole again.