Our trip to Vyzhniy Bereziv, a small western Ukrainian village in the Carpathians, started in a shuttle bus full of locals and their newly purchased piglets and chickens. It was Saturday, a market day in the nearest town Kolomyia.
There, in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, we were to explore the ethnic and recreational project “Berezivsky cottage” and experience the 19th century lifestyle. The project’s owner Volodymyr Kitseliuk, a psychotherapist, historian and now a private entrepreneur, inherited his grandma’s place a while ago and instead of selling an old house or ruining it to build something new, he turned it into a green tourism destination.
Now Kitseliuk invites tourists and recreates some elements of the old-fashioned rural life in the house of his ancestors. His guests live in the new wooden dwelling, with all the necessary modern amenities also built in the yard, but all the meals are usually cooked and served in old grandma’s house. There it is strictly forbidden to use mobile phones. “They would ruin the energy of the place,” Kitseliuk says. In the house the host prefers to explain local traditions and sing local folk songs of often funny or even obscene content.
The first meeting with traditions awaited us at lunch time. We were supposed to eat with wooden spoons from the common plate. Zupa (traditional soup with beans) and kulish (corn porridge) were served in big clay bowls.
Another ritual went with drinking. Our ancestors shared one small liqueur glass to drink homemade wine or hooch. The host was the first to fill and drink it, but only after saying “God grant health” to someone at the table and hearing “Drink healthy” in response. Then he filled the glass for the person he had addressed.
The ritual repeated as the glass circled the table. “It is pretty difficult to get drunk this way” Kitseliuk laughed.
Eating is not the only thing on the agenda at Berezivsky cottage though. Kitseliuk teaches to cook in the wood-burning stove, milk a cow, churn butter, spin and weave.
Together with his guests he climbs the nearest mountain Rotundul, 1.5 km high. Up there his fellow villagers keep a sheep farm and make cheese. It is also Kitseliuk’s favorite place to tell the history of the Bereziv neighborhood that can be seen at a glance from the top of the hill.
According to him all the locals are descendants of three brothers Stanko, Shandro and Vasko, who bought Bereza village back in 1418.
As a child Kitseliuk used to spend nearly every summer in the village. Later he moved to Kyiv for studying and working and came back home only 6 years ago.
It took two years to build a guest house and a while to test ideas and reject some of them. “I was planning to give people the real experience of 19th century life. But I tried to sleep on the bench along the window, as people did back then, and realized that no one would agree to this – it was too hard, the whole body was aching,” Kitseliuk recalls.
Besides developing his tourism business, Kitseliuk is writing a thesis about the history of the region’s noble class and researches his own family tree; he already knows his roots into the 16th century.
The host, a big fan of his land, nature and people himself, easily makes his visitors fall in love with the culture of the region, but confesses he does romanticize the region. “It was a place of my childhood”, Kitseliuk says. “Now, when I had already lived in the city I know that village life is a hard work.”
And that is what his tourists will have no doubt at after even a short stay in Berezivskyi Cottage. Our arms were aching after some usual rural activities. But, no worries, fun is also guaranteed.
Oksana Mamchenkova can be reached at [email protected]
