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Friday March 29, 2024

Lemkos: Abandoned minority of shattered Ukraine war zone

PEREMMOZHNE, Ukraine: Partially blind Tetyana has been living near the skeletal remains of a rebel-held airport in eastern Ukraine and surviving off hand-picked vegetables since war gripped the EU’s backyard last year.Her subsistence and that of 450 others in what remains of the village of Peremozhne has been made no

By our correspondents
October 10, 2015
PEREMMOZHNE, Ukraine: Partially blind Tetyana has been living near the skeletal remains of a rebel-held airport in eastern Ukraine and surviving off hand-picked vegetables since war gripped the EU’s backyard last year.
Her subsistence and that of 450 others in what remains of the village of Peremozhne has been made no easier by them being Lemkos—a tiny and largely forgotten minority whose tragic history has seen them tossed across eastern Europe for generations.
And the conflict in Ukraine is pushing them one step further to oblivion.
The unique people’s most famous son is Andy Warhol—the flamboyant US pop artist whose family emigrated from the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains that spill west into neighbouring Poland nearly a century ago. But the 40-year-old former shop owner has little time to take pride in artists as she plucks a slim cucumber off a nascent vine.
”Our farms were taken away by the separatists, who placed their military equipment there,” Tetyana says without disclosing her last name for fear of retribution from the pro-Russian insurgents in the eastern province of Lugansk.”The flags here changed constantly,” she says of an 18-month war that has gripped the former Soviet nation since its pro-Western revolution in Kiev.
”First there were the Ukrainian conscripts—young guys from Lviv who cried and begged us for a chance to phone their parents” living in the western and mostly nationalist city.
”Then came the (pro-Kiev) Aidar volunteer fighters, then the (pro-Russian) Lugansk insurgents, and now—the Russians,” Tetyana says.
”But in essence, none of them really cared about us much.”
Russia furiously denies its army’s presence or any other intervention in what it calls Ukraine’s “civil war”.
Tetyana may be forgiven for not devoting much thought to Warhol—the New York underground icon appeared to think little of his ancestral homeland as well. ”I am from nowhere,” he once famously said with a seemingly straight face.
The Lemkos’ history is indeed as complex as that of many other communities that suffered under various warlords and royalty who commanded central and eastern Europe for centuries.