The Lemko Republic - Lemko Nation on the Crossroads of History - Almost a Country - Episode 1 

You are most welcome! I also made a video where I travelled to the former Lemko capital, Florynka, and interviewed a local Lemko family about their past. You can find it on this channel too if you're interested.

@@AlmostaCountry How come I can't find it? What's the title of the video?

@@johnlabus7359 I don't know, it should be public. Here's the link: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-7WLX7Wdfjb8.html

Hi Jay! Glad to see so many people standing up to their heritage. If you want to see what Florynka looks like today, I recorded a short documentary there which you can find on this channel.

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-7WLX7Wdfjb8.html

@@AlmostaCountry Thanks, I will watch this one next!

@@AlmostaCountry Also, I can't believe you don't have more subscribers, I hope that you will gain traction in the RU-vid algorithm!

@@jackszyprowski Thanks! I don't think I'll make it there. :D I manage to upload quite seldom, so the algorithm will likely continue to ignore me. If you want to support my work in this regard, you can always show these videos to anyone you think would be interested in them. That would be most appreciated! :)

You're most welcome!

Dear Peter, I take it you are of Lemko descent? If you are, you might be interested in a special episode coming very soon, because I personally visited Florynka - the former Lemko capital - in quest of locating Dr. Jaroslav Kaczmarczyk's graveside. It will include a small tour around Florynka, the Lemko memorial cross and an interview with the last purely Lemko family living in Florynka (they were astonishing hosts and helped me a great deal).

Dear Almost a Country, Yes, you are correct. I'm of Lemko-Rusyn descent from the village of Binczarowa (Білцарева, Biltsariova), Poland.

Dear Peter, I actually made a short visit to Binczarowa on my way to Florynka! I visited a beautiful Greek-Catholic church with astonishing statues of Saint Isydor and many others. Did you know that in Binczarowa, next to that church, lies grave of Theophile Kaczmarczyk - father of Dr. Jaroslaw Kaczmarczyk, president of the Lemkos?

Peter, when I was in Florynka, I spoke with a Lemko, Mr. Kaniuk. He showed me a book about the history of the Lemko nation, written by a Lemko poet Petro Trochanowski who lives in Krynica-Zdrój. Is it possible that you are related to the author of this book?

Family name of Pawlak.

Thank you for your insight, Laszlo! My mother is from Eastern Slovakia, so I basically grew up surrounded by Rusyns. I've made many good friends among them. I agree I received one of the warmest welcomes in my life by Lemko family Kaniuk, when I was in Florynka doing a special episode. Very friendly and very proud. I was just sad to see that the Poles seem to have taken everything of culture from the Rusyns living in the south of Poland.

Thanks for the detailed breakdown of the events. I admit I brushed Operation Vistula really quickly there.

We're taught at school that Lemkos exist in Poland, that they have their spaces, language. They aren't overlooked by our education system, at least it was the case 10 years ago when I was still at school.

Jaromir, you can hardly call the massacres of Poles in Wołyń and eastern Galicia a "civil war" between two equal combatants. The UPA was "fighting" women, children, and old people, as the men were away at the Front. There were revenge killings from Poles, but it was not on the level of a civil war. As for Operation Vistula, unfortunately Lemkos got a raw deal from the Communists because the Banderites who came in from the east, were hiding among them. The Communists didn't differentiate, it seems like, and picked most everyone up for resettlement.

Interwar period was generally pretty banger in terms of emergent country ideas. Poland specifically was in a strange place between wars, jumping into many territorial conflicts with a lot of its neighbours.

Thank you!

Я звичайний українець! Чую "лемко" - думаю про Христину Соловій😄

Thank you! It means a lot!

Thank you for taking the time to watch it! True, I believe the misspellings originate in me taking information from non-Lemko and non-Polish literature, mostly Czech and Slovak, where his name was spelled like this. Some while ago I started researching the place where your husband's grandfather might be burried. I made one video about it, travelled to Florynka, talked with some people who still remembered the Lemko Republic. It's such a shame this great figure lacks a memorial where people could come and honour his memory. I found out more about his fate only recently from Bogdan Gorbal's books. I would like to create a video comprehensively describing Jaroslaw Kaczmarczyk's later life and legacy. Would you or your husband mind giving an interview on this topic? Could we maybe do a streamed call together?

@@AlmostaCountry I would be interested in talking with you. Details of Jaroslav's later life are scarce but I certainly have some pictures and information I could review and try to come up with some interesting facts and information.

@@peterkaczmarczyk8285 That would be incredible! Let's discuss this further via e-mail. Can you send me a message to almost-a-country@outlook.com ? Thank you again for your interest.

I hope your travel plans work out for you. The area around Florynka and Nowy Sacz is unique in Poland - rocky and wild, unlike the rest of the country. Florynka itself is quite ordinary village. If you want to get the real feel for the Lemko Republic, visit the village of Binczarewa, which was its cultural heart and its president's birthplace. It's very close to Florynka.

@@AlmostaCountry We are hoping to spend some time in Wislok Gorny, the birthplace of the leader of the East Lemkos. It looks very pretty, and I've heard that there's remains of an old Lemko cemetery near the church

@@johnposey1455 Wow, Pantaleymon Szpilka's birthplace? I haven't been there yet. If that wouldn't be much of a bother, could you perhaps send me any interesting details you'd find out about the man and the place (schlangentovy@gmail.com)? I wasn't able to find out much about the East Lemkos on my own.

@@AlmostaCountry I'll let you know whatever we find, and try to post a video myself! Unfortunately neither of us can speak a word of Polish, but we'll look for clues

@@johnposey1455 Wonderful, looking forward to it! If you know some words from nearly any other Slavic language, the Poles should understand.

Ah yes, Nestor Makhno. Sure, I could do that! The video would be interesting, long and detailed. I covered quite a lot of countries from the early 20th century and Eastern Europe. I want to diversify it with some curiosities from other parts of the world, but we'll get back to this time and space soon. In the meantime, there's a video I made about Italian Regency of Carnaro. They began in similar times and were both built on a similar premise - the current world is broken and we need to use anarchism and other revolutionary philosophies to build a society that would work better. But rest assured that fan requests are sacred to me. I have a list of them on my dashboard and I've added Makhnovia. It will come. :)

Hello! Information in the video deals with events that took place in the first half of the 20th century. I don't doubt that contemporary Poland doesn't discriminate Lemkos in any way. The presence of various memorials dedicated to Operation Vistula victims is a proof of that. I simply want to inform about what happened back then, mostly under very different regimes. Operation Vistula came about under the Communists and the initial conquest of the Lemko villages was under Marshall Piludski who had a difficult task of consolidating the country after centuries of separation. None of that is happening today, of course! I'm very happy about the Lemko language being allowed in schools, I didn't know that! :)

@@AlmostaCountry oh it's very good that you're talking about it, I 100% support your educational efforts. Piłsudski has committed many terrible crimes, but he is a national hero nonetheless... That is a big problem in Poland - lack of perspective while revising our history. We worship war criminals and refuse to see them for what they really were - best case scenario: complicated people in tough situation, worst: monsters who simply seized an opportunity to unleash their destructive tendencies. Piłsudski is merely the tip of the iceberg. I acknowledge that Piłsudski has some great achievements, but I'd rather die than have someone like him in power today. I only left a comment for more depth and contemporary context, not to disprove your video and definitely not to spread positive propaganda on Polish history.

My understanding is that while the original Lemko homeland is in Poland today, most Lemko people are in Ukraine (among other countries) because they were moved by the USSR. But Ukraine doesn’t recognize the Lemko or Rusyns as an ethnic group (even though it recognizes many others). And so, most ethnic Lemko have lost their language and ties to their culture.

The local variety of Rusyn language was codified in Poland as 'Lemko language' in the early 2000s, since then the community had a moderate upheaval, but overall it is never as it was due to people misplaced and lost connection with the homeland and culture. The current population of people self-identifying as Lemko in Poland is around 13 000.

You want to help? Share it, I think it's brilliant. :D

@@AlmostaCountry I live in this area. It's a very complex topic but it sounds like you aren't even aware that cities like Nowy Targ and Sacz that have been populated by Polish people for over a millenia. In your brilliant video you completely miss the large chunk of people wanting to join the Polish state.

Hi@@bongfarmer, I'm aware that larger cities of the area were mostly ethnically Polish. If you were referring to the map I've shown in the video, it doesn't factually refer to the jurisdiction the Lemkos held over their territory (which consisted of some dozen villages), but rather to the borders they claimed for their republic. I cannot say there weren't any Lemkos wanting to join the Polish in a united country, but the issue here is that the Polish state was around for a few years by the time the Lemkos declared their country and in spite of Poland being the obviously natural choice for an ally, the Lemko political leaders thought this option was out of question. Instead, they decided to be independent or tried to find a way to join Russia which they didn't even shared any borders with. Joining Poland would have saved them a lot of this trouble. It seems however that they felt the trouble was worth it. I visited several of the villages which made the Lemko Republic. Each had an originally Greek Catholic or Orthodox church, which was resanctified as a Roman Catholic church in the 1940s. Next, if you look at the gravestones in local cemeteries, there are barely any gravestones with Polish language on them older than, say, 100 years. Most of these old graves are all written in Rusyn Cyrillic. I even met some Lemkos who returned there after Operation Vistula. They don't even speak Polish. The culture of the Lemko people is different than the Polish. When I see how Polish so often can't stand Russians and Ukrainians, I find it very likely there was some kind of similar adversity between the Polish and the Lemkos, which lead to the Operation Vistula, the forceful relocation of Lemkos into Eastern Prussia and Pomerania, recatholizing the Lemko churches and resettlement of the area by mostly purely Polish populace. You don't do that to an area with large chunks of people who want to join your country in peace. But enough of my rant. This video was particularly focused on the course of action the Lemko politicians wanted to go with. I can assure you that joining Poland wasn't a scenario for them. More on the topic can be found in a book about the history of Binczarewa by Petro Trochanowski.

Isn't Konoshevka pretty far away?

I'm very sorry, but I am not Rusyn myself and I don't speak the Rusyn language. If you've seen the video where I visited Florynka, I spoke with the locals using a mix of Czech, Slovak and Polish. I can try and contact some friends, though. Hopefully, I can help you translate it. :) By the way, as an Orthodox monk, you will like my next video - it will be about Don Cossack republic and it's coming out soon.

@@AlmostaCountry i wish they had a country the rusyns.... and circassians.

I m too late here but I m greek catholic rusyn from Slovakia and if we are praying we are praying in church slavonic so translation is: Hospody Isuse Christe pomiluj ňa hrišňaho. I hope i help you

@@mocanucatalincristi136Rusyns have a country, Ukraine

There is a year mentioned on screen when I mention Operation Vistula, from which it should be obvious it wasn't 2nd Republic Poland. But even the Communist government of 1947 was a legitimate Polish government at the time and not everything it did can be justified with Russian influence. That being said, I found out that Jaroslaw Kaczmarczyk actually died as a direct result of a KGB operation. I will make a video on that.

@@AlmostaCountry 1947 elections were absolutely not legitimate, communist government of Poland was enforced not elected

Hi Davyd, I often find that to be true, especially in Eastern Europe. Countries such as Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine and to a lesser extent Poland have strong and specific regional cultural differences. Sometimes the region in question is quite large, like Lemkyvschyna, and sometimes it's just a handful of villages, such as in Bihar. That's why I try my best to refer to the entities I speak about in my videos as countries, since one country may include dozens of nations/nationalities such as Ukraine or Spain. I agree that from etymological perspective, the term "Rusyn" originates from the name of Kievan Rus', but I would argue that its meaning has changed over the centuries. You see scores of people (mostly non-Ukrainian citizens) who consider themselves Rusyns, but not Ukrainian. Their ancestry is mostly Carpathian and their culture has more elements similar to Polish and Slovak cultures compared i.e. to the people who live in the rural areas near Kiev.

I’m originally from podolye It’s part of Ukraine I’m Rusyn and Polak at the same time 🤔

@@romankuchevskiy250 Podillia

@High Blood Pressure Natural Cure exactly!

Rusyn was a very flexible term for most of its history. It wasn't a strict ethnic label until the latter part of the 19th c, by which time the Ukrainian ethnicity had split away from it. Lots of primary sources from 18th and 19th century Hungarian kingdom refer to Greek Catholics (Uniates) as Rusyns, even though many of these people were speaking eastern Slovak dialects.

So, I'm partially Slovak and I travelled around Lemkivschina quite extensively (as per my other video). In Poland, Lemko villages are almost empty of Lemko families. But in Slovakia they have their own schools, government offices, they can use their language as an official way of communication. Latest census data tells us that: - 63 556 Lemkos in Slovakia - around 11 000 in Poland - only about 700 Lemkos in Ukraine So, why don't you tell us where we can find more Lemkos than in Slovakia? And don't forget to back it with sources!

​@@AlmostaCountry Using the term "Lemko" to describe Rusyns in Slovakia is debatable. Rusyns generally reserve it for the Rusyn/Lemko population from Poland. Rusyns in Slovakia have never self-described as Lemkos and don't identify as such. There's more to say about it but in short, calling them Lemko requires a big caveat at the very least. This is not meant as criticism but it is an important point. Side note, up to 70% of Lemkos (sensu stricto!) were resettled to Soviet Ukraine, there are many more people with Lemko ancestry there. They are largely assimilated and see themselves as ethnic Ukrainians, which has always been the view of the Ukrainian state.

@@esetomash Well, sure. It is debatable, as we can mostly rely on census data. Census data generally won't tell us a person's ancestry, but rather whether they feel connected to their ancestry. Like you're saying, if they describe themselves as ethnic Ukrainians, then you cannot tell whether they have Lemko heritage from the census alone. One thing that I can definitely say outside from census data, having lived there and personally talked to Lemkos as well as Rusyns, is that there are Lemkos in Slovakia. I don't use this term interchangeably with Rusyns in general. Slovakia is a country with a huge number of minority ethnicities and many of them are of different German and Rusyn origins. You have the historically strong, protestant Mantak, Zipser and other Carpatho-German ethnicities located in the centre and centre-north of the country. Of the Rusyn origin, there are a couple of ethnicities such as the Huculs, Boykos and the Carpatho-Ruthenians from the area around Užhorod. Most of these families, if located in Slovakia, live very close to the direct east of the country, near cities such as Košice, Bardejov, Humenné, Trebišov and Michalovce. Lemkos from the area around Bilcareva and Florynka lived quite more west than these ethnicities and used to seamlessly migrate for various reasons to the Slovak centre-north to the vicinity of Stará Lubovňa, Levoča and Kežmarok. After all, that area south of Nowy Sacz used to belong to Hungary until the restoration of Poland, and then partly to Slovakia during WW2. In the Slovak Šariš region you have Lemkos mixing with the other Rusyns and the lines are being blurred there, so it's easy for some to not see the difference. But the culture made its mark on the Slovak north and you can see many Lemko family graves and their traditional orthodox churches there. I went to school with a Lemko girl from Levoča, that's in fact how I came up with the idea for the video, in fact.

@@AlmostaCountry Nevylučujem, že sa niektorí jednotlivci môžu identifikovať ako Lemkovia, ale lemkovská komunita ako taková na Slovensku nie je. Ide o historický kontext názvu Lemkovia: Rusíni Poľska ho prijali ako sebaoznačenie až začiatkom 20. storočia z politických dôvodov. Rusíni Slovenska ho neprijali, lebo sa nachádzali v inej politickej situácii. Keď sme u lemkovského štátu, tak to asi stojí za zdôraznenie. Samozrejme sú príbuzní, z etnografického hľadiska dokonca patria spolu (včetne Spiša a Zemplína, t.j. skoro všetci Rusíni Slovenska) - a súhlasím, že tie podobnosti je lepšie vidiet na hranici, čo je celkom prirodzené. Ale zopakujem, že v rusínskej komunite sa názov Lemkovia používa ako regionálny pro Rusínov Poľska, nie Slovenska.

@@esetomash V tom prípade samozrejme záleží, ako si definujeme Lemkov. Dá sa na to pozerať tak, ako vravíte, ako sa skupina ľudí sama označuje, od kedy a z akých dôvodov. Dá sa na to pozerať aj etnograficky, kde sa berie v potaz prirodzené šírenie kultúry v svojom ohraničenom území. Pre účely videa som postupoval s etnografickou úvahou, že Rusíni severného Spiša sú určite viac príbuzní s Rusínmi južného Malopolska z okolia Bilcarevy a Krynicze-Zdroju, než s Rusínmi ďalej na východ, sú viac menej členmi tej istej etnickej skupiny, ktorá si v Polsku hovorí Lemkovia. Možno si z rôzných dôvodov hovoria inak - ako napríklad kvôli skorej československej národnostnej politike, ale na hraniciach sa jednalo o tie isté rodiny na obidvoch stranách. Vetvu rodiny prezidenta Kaczmarczyka je možné nájsť na cintoríne v slovenskej Osturni, napríklad. Avšak samozrejme Rusín nie som, iba sa s niektorými Rusínmi znám. Ďakujem teda za poučný vnútorný náhľad. :)

Yes, that is true. This was my first video, so there are some errors and inconsistencies. In this case, I mixed up the WUPR and the Ukrainska Derzhava of Pavlo Skoropadsky. WUPR was declared independently from the Derzhava on what was at that time Austrian Galicia. The Derzhava was established further east by the Germans after defeating the revolutionary army there. I mixed them up at the time because they both shared quite conservative leadership in contrast to the later, more socialist Ukrainian People's Republic of Symon Petliura and other revolutionaries.

Hello Mocanu, thanks for your wish. I would love to see that! I call them "almost" countries only from the historical point of view. The nations and people I talk about are very much real and they all have their distinct cultures and legacies. I always found it sad that history books almost never teach about these stories and so I took it upon myself to try and raise some awareness for them.

There not Romanian or Moldavian so there not Dacian

@@romankuchevskiy250 They are closest to romanians

No there not

They have Hungarian influence

They came from Kyiv RUS

Yet it didn't scare Poland away. Future videos will hold flags even worse.

Dear Alexander Storey, says who ???

The green just needs to be more green and the yellow and blue just needs to be like the yellow and green of Ukraine.

Dear Sardar jaiveer singh sidhu, dreadful advice. By the way Ukrainian flag is yellow and green ??? Not bad conception.

@Round Duck, Please explain. Why is Lemko a dreadful name?