Dezider Milly and that other Carpatho-Rusyn artist family from what is now Slovakia.

I purchased the art postcard booklet while visiting Slovakia.

Exactly which visit to Slovakia eludes me, although probably it was 1991-92, during my English teaching assignment in Košice, when the geopolitical designation still was Czechoslovakia.

Decades later, we often sift through the accumulated memorabilia, knickknacks and posters, and after one such expedition, Diana propped the booklet on her desk downstairs. I need my own museum for all this stuff.

After looking at the booklet every day for months, it finally occurred to me to find out who Dezider Milly was. Translating from the Slovak-language Wikipedia:

Dezider Milly

Professor Dezider Milly (* 7 August 1906, Kyjov - † 1 September 1971, Bratislava ) was a Slovak painter, graphic designer and pedagogue, a representative of the visual arts of the Rusyns in Slovakia.

Kyjov's just north of Košice.

Dezider Milly – a big artist from a tiny village, at RUSYN ART ("Meet Carpatho-Rusyn visual artists")

Dezider Milly was a Rusyn artist born in Kyjov, in the district of Stara Lubovna in eastern Slovakia. He achieved the status of a nationally recognized artist.

The most detailed on-line biography of Milly in English is here. Note the spelling of the artist's name.

Myllyi’s active participation in the political and cultural life of post-World War II Communist Czechoslovakia had a negative impact on his artistic creativity. His paintings became little more than highly politicized figurative illustrations. This applied as well to his series entitled Tokaik (1959), based on the tragic wartime shootings of the village of Tokajik’s Rusyn inhabitants, an event which had deeply moved the artist. In the 1960s Myllyi moved away from his narrow politicized vision and began to create large-scale decorative panoramic landscapes. As if making up for the creative time lost during the post-1948 Communist era, Myllyi began in the last years of his life to paint a series of landscapes in his unique prewar style. While he was influenced by the various new artistic currents of the twentieth century, Myllyi’s true artistic roots were embedded in the realities of his native Carpathian region. Since his death, a permanent exhibit of his work is on display at the Dezyderii Myllyi Art Gallery (est. 1983), which is part of the *Museum of Ukrainian-Rus’ Culture in Svidnik, Slovakia.

You're forgiven for being confused; we began this essay in Slovakia, and ever since it's been about Milly as a Rusyn.

So, what's a Rusyn?

Rusyns (sometimes spelled Rusins, or called Carpatho-Rusyns signifying their villages being in the Carpathian Mountains) are one of the many nationalities/ethnic groups of Slovakia, along with Slovaks, Hungarians, Germans, and Romanies (Gypsies). Rusyns are eastern Slavs, which means that their history, culture, and language are rooted in the medieval Kievan Rus' kingdom (Slovaks, by contrast, are western Slavs), although Slovaks and Rusyns have lived together on the same territory for nearly 1000 years (and share some cultural traits). Traditionally, almost all Rusyns belong to the Byzantine/Greek Catholic or Orthodox Christian churches. Rusyns have never had their own country, but their homeland today lies in 3 countries: Slovakia, Ukraine (the Transcarpathian Oblast, former Subcarpathian Rus/Ruthenia, part of Czecho-Slovakia from 1919 until 1939), and Poland (the Lemko Region, formerly part of Galicia). There are approximately 1.5 million Rusyns in Europe today, and about 120,000 of them are in Slovakia.

Three of Milly's late-period landscapes:

This brings me full circle, as there's a Carpatho-Rusyn artist far better known internationally than Milly. It's Andy Warhol, whose father came to the United States in 1914.

It boggles my mind that it's been just shy of seven years since Warhol's brother John died, prompting the most recent reference in NAC to Rusyns prior to today.

----

John Warhola's passing inspires a Medzilaborce remembrance.

John Warhola has died, and therein lies a story.

In the fall of 1991, having only recently assumed my duties teaching conversational English to staff members at Košice's university hospital, I was asked by Dr. Roland, the hospital's first non-Communust administrator, if I'd like to accompany him to a Saturday afternoon museum opening in Medzilaborce, Slovakia.

The trip involved a total of seven hours on the road, to and from Medzilaborce, a lengthy commute not fully suggested by maps which did not account for the fractured condition of rural Slovak roads and a handful of "touristic" stops along the way. Dr. Roland did not drive, and at the time, he still made use of the hospital's de facto chauffered limo service, with its fleet of Soviet-made gas guzzlers and uniformed personnel.

What a ride!

Medzilaborce is cradled within the northern terminus of the Carpathians, which then veer westward to end in exclamatory fashion at the compact Tatra mountain range. Small towns are nestled between rugged, forested ridge lines. Poland is only a few miles away. This isolated area of Slovakia (as yet Czechoslovakia in 1991) is inhabited by Slovaks, Poles and indigenous Rusyns, the latter of the Orthodox persuasion, accounting for the gorgeous church in the center of town, and explaining the road signs in the Cyrillic alphabet: Меджильабірці.

Two large Campbell's Tomato Soup cans guarding the doorway of an otherwise nondescript concrete building gave the game away, for Andy Warhol's family was Rusyn, the collection now known as the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art was an embryonic East-West cultural venture in the immediate aftermath of Communism, and Andy's brother John was on hand to speak for the foundation.

Andy Warhol's elder brother dies aged 85; John Warhola was one of three founding members of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (in the Guardian)

After Warhola's father, Andrij, died in 1942, Warhola raised his younger brother, Andy (born Andy Warhola), and made sure he attended college. Their father, who had emigrated to the US from what is now Slovakia in 1914, left enough to pay for Andy's first two years of college, but his brother took responsibility for the reminder of the artist's education.

And so, that's how I came to meet John Warhola, if only for a few seconds and a handshake in a receiving line.

"Surreal" doesn't really do it justice, but I'm happy to see that the museum has survived and apparently prospered during the two decades since my visit. In 1991, we capped the opening with early dinner at a restaurant down the street, which served delicious pork and knedlicky dumplings with roasted potatoes, all washed down with cool golden lager brewed down the road in Prešov.

With requisite condolences at John Warhola's passing, I dedicate these memories of that singular day to him.

---

As you might imagine, I'd like to go back.

REWIND HOLIDAZE EDITION 1: Slovaks and troglodytes.

I've always enjoyed keeping 'em guessing, and so a Beer Money column entitled "Long ago in Slovakia" was published in the pre-merger 'Bune on December 3, 2009. The full text hasn't appeared here until now.

There was an entertaining aftermath, in the form of comments amid a maze of Bledsottian irrelevancies at the blog still called The Voice of the People, which Shirley Baird seems no longer to actively steward (last posting in May, 2012). Back in 2009, I answered the troglodyte's critique here: My visit to PassiveAggressiveLand.

---

Long ago in Slovakia.

My family traces its ethnic roots to Germany, but to this day, I’m unclear as to whether the Christian preferences of my ancestors ran toward Catholic or Protestant. Perhaps there were even unbelievers like me slipping their genes into the mix. If so, they were probably quiet about it.

It used to be that German Catholic immigrants to America celebrated December 6, St. Nicholas Day, as the day for giving gifts. Without a religious upbringing to speak of, St. Nicholas Day made no impression on me until December, 1991. I was living in the city of Kosice, Slovakia, and working as an English teacher. It was my first holiday season spent abroad, and a compelling experience.

Here’s something I wrote at the time.

---

A Christmas Dispatch from Slovakia December, 1991.

There's a good chance of a White Christmas in Slovakia.

The winter's first snow has come and gone, and although we didn't get very much, it was enough to add a cheerful hazard for pedestrians in the forms of sleds, multitudes of them, some of old fashioned wood construction, others of molded plastic. More sleds than I've ever seen have appeared as if by magic from closets and storage rooms, to be pulled by their brightly outfitted young owners and steered at breakneck speed down any and all available slopes, inhabited or otherwise.

They had been charging down the wide sidewalk that leads from Festival Square and ascends the low ridge to the hospital complex where I teach, and the snow on the walkway had been firmly packed into an icy surface that defied sure footing, and the reason I know this is because I was trying to walk up the hill – and failing miserably.

You can't blame the children for failing to understand (or to care about) the consequences of their fun. After all, children don't have as far to fall.

It was a good day for a walk. The snow was fresh and powdery, and it crunched loudly beneath my boots. The white dusting on the cupolas and steeples of the old city brightened the sooty, aging facades. Even the look-alike gray rows of block housing were softened by the white.

The sunshine was bright and surface temperatures no lower than freezing, but a sharp, gusting wind from the north kicked up miniature/a> snow squalls and blew the clothes on the ubiquitous clotheslines into frozen, horizontal positions.

The chill made me think of Russia. The Soviet Union used to be close to Kosice, but now the line on the obsolete map is the border of the infant Ukrainian republic, and who knows the procedure for crossing that border?

Probably a bottle of Scotch and a smile.

The cold flowing into Kosice from Siberia will be as close as I get to Russia this trip, yet I can still see our fur clad, vodka wielding, erstwhile enemies waiting in line for brown bread. It makes me think of the cruel toll of forty years of Cold War: Hunger, homelessness, environmental degradation, social upheaval, rampant violence, the decay of the family, impending economic catastrophe and these are America's spoils of "victory."

In the former U.S.S.R., the situation is even worse.

But Christmas is coming, and somewhere in a valley near Kosice, in the backyard of a quaint farm, a goose is getting fat. Barrels are being inspected to gauge the progress of the cured cabbage that will form the base of the traditional holiday soup. A trip to a nearby town is being planned. There will be shopping for gifts and a visit to the fish market for carp, another holiday staple or perhaps the fish will be vended from oversized plastic tubs, to be weighed and wrapped right on the street.

For an American, there's an eerie quality to the Christmas season in Slovakia. For starters, decorations didn't begin to appear until the first week of December; then again, what can you expect of such an unenlightened country where there's no contrived holiday like Halloween to mark the beginning of the shopping season?

Only a few tasteful, understated window displays are to be seen in the stores, and high ¬pressure, guilt laced sales tactics aren't in evidence at all. Slovakia obviously has much to learn about economics before its people can begin to see the wisdom of centering all hopes on wild overspending at Christmas to keep the economy afloat.

In Slovakia, Santa Claus makes his rounds on the eve of St. Nicholas Day (December 6). Children scrub and polish their shoes and place them on the windowsill to be filled with candy and chocolate, but only if they've been good. If not, they're supposed to receive a bundle of twigs bound together and intended for use to swat their you know what. On Christmas Eve, rumor has it that gifts are not delivered by Santa, but by Jesus himself.

In Communist times the regime attempted to persuade the populace that a chap named Grandfather Frost brought the goodies, presumably on behalf of the benevolent leadership.

There are Christmas trees and caroling in the streets by children, one of whom might carry a representation of the manger, and maybe the singers will be rewarded for their efforts with fruit and cookies.

In short, despite tight economic times and a full list of daunting problems to be solved, the holiday season in Slovakia is proceeding according to schedule and tradition. I've been given a bottle of homemade peach brandy for St. Nicholas Day; the doctor who gave it to me instructed me to make a Christmas Eve toast to peace, health and a good harvest. On a cold day, with steaming sauerkraut soup just around the comer, the toast strikes me as a true and noble thought.

The gentle embrace of a Velvet Divorce.

20 years ago next year, there was a Velvet Divorce.

Before that, there had been a Velvet Revolution. It occurred in 1989, and was a largely peaceful process wherein the central European nation of Czechoslovakia disengaged from Soviet hegemony. The world looked on in admiration as bloodshed was avoided … and then its attention was diverted to other matters.

Meanwhile, as communism was being deposited into history’s dustbin, subsequent events within Czechoslovakia illustrated that merely escaping the clutches of the Warsaw Pact would not be sufficient to resolve cultural and structural deficiencies inherent to the Czechoslovak state. A second discussion began.

Hence, the Velvet Divorce in 1993. The marriage had lasted more than seventy years, through very troubled times.

Czechoslovakia had come into existence only after World War I as one of the new countries created from the collapse of Austria-Hungary. To better make a case for independence, leaders from Bohemia and Moravia (the Czech lands) and Slovakia forged an alliance and pushed for one inclusive state, concluding that self-determination according to the ideals of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points might occur among separate cultural entities so long as the parties agreed to the union.

In spite of a prevailing view of Czechoslovakia as a model interwar democracy, there proved to be numerous snags between Czechs and Slovaks. Both are Slavs, and they speak languages that are similar, though not entirely the same. They’re much alike, and also not. As indigenous populations within the Austro-Hungarian empire, Czechs and Slovaks might be said to have been raised quite differently. The Czech lands were administered by Austria’s ruling ethnic Germans, and the Slovaks by Hungary – and Hungarians are neither Slav nor German, and came late (late 1800’s) to the power-sharing game within the empire itself.

Bohemia and Moravia became industrialized early in the 19th-century, and were the empire’s manufacturing hub. Imperial rule was bureaucratic, and yet more relaxed there. Concurrently, Slovakia was rural and agricultural from the start, and the Hungarian administration considerably more restrictive.

Even after World War II, when Slovakia was belatedly industrialized, the Soviet-model factories built often were outmoded at birth, serving mostly to produce heavy armaments for East Bloc military use. The Slovaks were dealt some bad hands, and played some hands badly. The point is that formative experiences among the Slovak and Czech peoples were quite different.

In short, when the Wall came down, fissures in the Czech-Slovak marriage became visible and bubbled to the surface. Unity against a common enemy no longer sufficed to inculcate togetherness. Throughout the country, there were high emotions ranging from regret, sadness and disappointment to hostility, chest-thumping and bravado. The situation among these peoples in a formerly united country genuinely might have been said to resemble the atmosphere of a crumbling marriage.

There was a desperate need for cool heads, counseling and compromise, lest the split become final. There were dire predictions of disaster.

No one stepped forward. The Czech lands and Slovakia went their separate ways.

And almost nothing bad happened.

In fact, many good things happened.

The divorce?

It really was Velvet.

Two decades later, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are doing as well as most European countries, and better than several others. Of course, political, social and economic issues within these two nations are many and varied; Czech politics can be comically Italianesque, and Slovak relations with Hungary tend to be strained. Neither country does particularly well with its minority populations of Roma (i.e., gypsies). But significantly, these Czech and Slovak problems have next to nothing to do with each other.

At the time of the Velvet Divorce, it often was asked why Czechs and Slovaks would ignore the superior economies of scale afforded by national unity. Why would they duplicate governmental and economic functions when there were only 10 million people altogether living in Czechoslovakia?

Because: The overlay of unity was shown to have been artificial, and the combined functions of one state never adequately addressed the regional difference and needs of two. Czechoslovakia proved to have been a shotgun marriage all along. Now it is not, and since the divorce, the formerly married parties generally get along just fine.

Amazing, isn't it? It makes you think separation might actually work the same way in other places, too.

John Warhola's passing inspires a Medzilaborce remembrance.

John Warhola has died, and therein lies a story.

In the fall of 1991, having only recently assumed my duties teaching conversational English to staff members at Kosice's university hospital, I was asked by Dr. Roland, the hospital's first non-Communust administrator, if I'd like to accompany him to a Saturday afternoon museum opening in Medzilaborce, Slovakia.

The trip involved a total of seven hours on the road, to and from Medzilaborce, a lengthy commute not fully suggested by maps which did not account for the fractured condition of rural Slovak roads and a handful of "touristic" stops along the way. Dr. Roland did not drive, and at the time, he still made use of the hospital's de facto chauffered limo service, with its fleet of Soviet-made gas guzzlers and uniformed personnel.

What a ride!

Medzilaborce is cradled within the northern terminus of the Carpathians, which then veer westward to end in exclamatory fashion at the compact Tatra mountain range. Small towns are nestled between rugged, forested ridgelines. Poland is only a few miles away. This isolated area of Slovakia (as yet Czechoslovakia in 1991) is inhabited by Slovaks, Poles and indigenous Rusyns, the latter of the Orthodox persuasion, accounting for the gorgeous church in the center of town, and explaining the road signs in the Cyrillic alphabet: Меджильабірці.

Two large Campbell's Tomato Soup cans guarding the doorway of an otherwise nondescript concrete building gave the game away, for Andy Warhol's family was Rusyn, the collection now known as the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art was an embryonic East-West cultural venture in the immediate aftermath of Communism, and Andy's brother John was on hand to speak for the foundation.

Andy Warhol's elder brother dies aged 85; John Warhola was one of three founding members of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (in the Guardian)

After Warhola's father, Andrij, died in 1942, Warhola raised his younger brother, Andy (born Andy Warhola), and made sure he attended college. Their father, who had emigrated to the US from what is now Slovakia in 1914, left enough to pay for Andy's first two years of college, but his brother took responsibility for the reminder of the artist's education.

And so, that's how I came to meet John Warhola, if only for a few seconds and a handshake in a receiving line.

"Surreal" doesn't really do it justice, but I'm happy to see that the museum has survived and apparently prospered during the two decades since my visit. In 1991, we capped the opening with early dinner at a restaurant down the street, which served delicious pork and knedlicky dumplings with roasted potatoes, all washed down with cool golden lager brewed down the road in Presov.

With requisite condolences at John Warhola's passing, I dedicate these memories of that singular day to him.

My visit to PassiveAggressiveLand.

(It’s a non-revitalized neighborhood of the Open Air Museum)

Normally I wouldn’t do this, but this time I will, primarily because it’s been a wonderful weekend.

An anonymous writing critic spewed at Voice of the People, and I responded, although not to the critic’s satisfaction. The topic is my column in Thursday’s Tribune: BAYLOR: Long ago in Slovakia.

Seeing as teeth marks from a hooded canine wannabeen remain imbedded in the denim of my jeans, here’s the “dialogue” to date.

Anonymous said...
What does being an Atheist have anything to do with St. Nicholas day or having Germanic heritage in a Slavic nation? What was the point or the need for that information? What was the author getting at? The column would have been a very good one if wasn’t for the first two paragraphs. It would have been par with the one about Armistice Day.

Roger said …
St. Nicholas Day is on the 6th. The column was published on the 3rd, hence (a) the topical reference to St. Nicholas in the intro, and (b) the fact that it also was mentioned in the text about Slovakia.

Anonymous said …
I sorry but your response doesn't answer any of my questions sufficiently. They are just oblique answers. The intro was irreverent or not necessary.

Roger said …
Shrug. I got paid to write it, and you didn't. 'Nuff said, hooded one.

Anonymous said …
I think the questions are viable. You have accused others of making irrelevant comments etc. What does being an Atheist have anything to do with St. Nicolas Day? What relevance did it have to do with the story? How is being paid, to write in the Tribs editorial section, have anything to do with explaining the relevancy of being an Atheist and St. Nicolas Day. If you are paid shouldn’t your column be of the highest quality of writing? The Trib will print just about any person’s letters or allow anyone to be a guest columnist when they make you a staff reporter or editor then you may have something to brag about. And yes, I do read your column along with others please help me understand yours better.

Roger said …
I suspect I'll eventually address your "questions," probably at NAC, but not here.

What is the one thing held in common by each of the roles you cite, from letter writer to columnist, and including editors and reporters?

They all sign their names to their work. Consequently, I'm not interested in a serious conversation with passive/aggressive anonymous folks like you. Create whatever rationalizations or excuses you like for anonymity -- indulge yourself and be creative -- but it doesn't imply that I have any responsibility to cooperate with the indulgence.

I stand behind what I say and write. If I'm correct, there's credit, and if wrong, there's blame. So it goes. Why should I waste more time than the five minutes its taken to write these words to "discuss" something with someone who doesn't share my ethos?

It's just all Bledsottian to me (it's a new word I just invented).

Thanks for reading nonetheless.

---

As for the more blatantly obvious passive/aggressive deficiencies of the anonymous writer (“Bledsottian” references this trait), these can be discussed another time. For now, I’ll try again to answer the questions asked, because for some of you, it may provide an insight into the creative process.

Following two weeks of poking sticks through the bars of the Open Air Museum’s theistic and holiday season cages, I wanted to write something counter-intuitive, but that still referenced the preceding discussions. The holiday piece from 1991 seemed appropriate, but it needed an introduction.

The common theme chronologically was St. Nicholas Day, which was mentioned in the original story, and which would be coming three days after the publication date of the column. To even the most casual of observers, and as such traditions go, St. Nicholas Day in America is traceable to European immigrants, primarily those from Central Europe.

Recalling that ethnic Germans once lived across broad swaths of Central Europe, including areas that are now “Slavic” nations (Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia), and in non-Slavic Hungary and Romania, and that my family background comes entirely from German immigrants, it didn’t strike me as far-fetched to combine these elements in the introduction.

Anonymous asks: “What does being an Atheist have anything to do with St. Nicolas Day?” and “What relevance did it have to do with the story?”

Having devoted previous columns to atheism, and having established my family’s Central European roots in theism, with the strong possibility that like the people I met in Slovakia, earlier generations of my family would have celebrated St. Nicholas Day in the immigrant tradition, there is attendant irony in my having emerged these many years later as an atheist. There’s also the fact that a century ago, it might not have been very healthful for a family member to confess atheistic leanings openly, which today can be done without overt fear of persecution apart from anonymous critics.

Hope that helps. I’d love to sit down with you and drink a beer while discussing it further, except you refuse to follow the blog policy of disclosure, and hoods remind me of the Klan.

Things like that just don’t help the nectar go down.

Thanks for reading.

Today's Tribune column: "Long ago in Slovakia."

I enjoy keeping them guessing.

BAYLOR: Long ago in Slovakia

The winter's first snow has come and gone, and although we didn't get very much, it was enough to add a cheerful hazard for pedestrians in the forms of sleds, multitudes of them, some of old fashioned wood construction, others of molded plastic. More sleds than I've ever seen have appeared as if by magic from closets and storage rooms, to be pulled by their brightly outfitted young owners and steered at breakneck speed down any and all available slopes, inhabited or otherwise.