Romania's Ukrainians slowly enhance identity

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Subject: Romania's Ukrainians slowly enhance identity

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Romania's Ukrainians slowly enhance identity


Romania's Ukrainians slowly enhance identity
 
By Ron Popeski
 
SIGHETU MARMATIEI, Romania, Aug 6 (Reuters) - Teodor Popovici, one of
Romania's 300,000 ethnic Ukrainians, remembers how under communism it
was forbidden to look across the Tissa River to Soviet Ukraine on the
other bank.
 
Now he is head of the country's sole Ukrainian-language high school
which opened in 1997 more than 35 years after the communists closed
its predecessor. Housed alongside a physical education school, it now
operates with 230 pupils.
 
Popovici wants to expand to put a dispersed, and largely impoverished,
Ukrainian community more in touch with its roots.
 
"All contact with Ukraine was strictly discouraged," he said in the
main office of the school in the bustling town of Sighetu Marmatiei in
the heart of northern Romania's Maramures region.
 
"Border guards used to bend the rules. They didn't bother women
washing their clothes or children going for a swim. But that didn't
make life much easier for us."
 
His own life illustrates how it was difficult to maintain cultural
identity in an area where borders frequently moved.
 
Popovici's father, captured while fighting in the Nazi-allied Romanian
army, was kept in Soviet Ukraine at the end of World War Two and
prevented from returning home for seven years because of bureaucratic
tangles.
 
But he says even now his community has little interest in developments
across the border in what has been an independent Ukrainian state
since the 1991 collapse of Soviet rule.
 
ETHNIC MINORITIES A SENSITIVE POST-COMMUNIST ISSUE
 
The issue of minorities has been sensitive in post-communist times,
with Romanian newspapers constantly accusing Ukraine of denying its
300,000 ethnic Romanians cultural rights. Ukraine denies the
allegations, pointing to dozens of schools and other cultural
facilities in one border district alone.
 
Sighetu Marmatiei, probably best known as the birthplace of Jewish
Nobel prize winning writer Elie Wiesel, is a focal point for the
50,000 ethnic Ukrainians in Maramures.
 
In a region of dramatic hills dotted with immaculately preserved
wooden churches, they have no newspaper and no air time on local radio
or television, though some catch broadcasts from over the border. Many
have Romanian names and speak halting Ukrainian, mixed liberally with
Romanian phrases.
 
Popovici's school, along with kindergartens being set up in nearby
villages populated mainly by ethnic Ukrainians, is starting to change
matters in the post-communist period.
 
"There's much more contact with Ukraine now and people cross the
border regularly," said Rodica Mahanet, 38, as she joined a wedding
procession in Remeti, a Tissa village west of Sighetu.
 
"That's how I earn money since I was made redundant, buying coffee in
Ukrainian towns to sell here. There's not much money in it, but it
keeps us going, with our garden and animals."

Nearly all villagers spoke excellent Ukrainian and several children
were considering making the 25 km (18 mile) journey each day to attend
the Ukrainian school in Sighetu Marmatiei.
 
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE ELSEWHERE
 
But there seemed little hope for the future for guests who moved from
the newly built Orthodox church to the wedding reception - in an
unfinished building with large carpets draped over paneless windows to
reduce draughts.
 
The bridegroom, 24-year-old Mihai Sofinet, had been working on a
construction site in the Czech Republic and most present agreed he
would probably have to take his bride back with him.
 
A nearby house was also incomplete, its construction abandoned when
the owner died soon after returning home flush with cash from a long
stay in the United States.
 
Living standards were even lower in more isolated villages east of
Sighetu, where no border crossings to Ukraine had yet been established
through rugged mountain territory.
 
In Poienile de sub Munte, teeming with shoppers while a ramshackle
Sunday market was in operation, unemployment was so endemic that it
was easier to keep track of residents with jobs.
 
A Ukrainian "Budynok Kultury" (cultural centre) in a main square
belied the difficulty locals had speaking the language.
 
"We find ourselves stuck in the middle. We are not Romanians, yet nor
are we real Ukrainians," said 47-year-old Maria Miculaiciuc, her head
draped in a kerchief according to the local custom for married, and
sometimes single, women.
 
Miculaiciuc was luckier than most. Her son was now a teacher after she
had saved enough to send him to a college in Ukraine.
 
Residents of Ruscova, three km (1.8 miles) down the road, saw their
only hope in joining relatives who had somehow managed to go abroad.
 
"The mines have shut, the wood processing industry no longer exists,"
said Mihai Bumbar, downing a beer in the bar doubling as a discotheque
for idle teenagers.
 
"But I can't see things being any better over there," he says,
gesturing towards the border.
 
UKRAINIANS START TO HELP THEMSELVES
 
Back at the Ukrainian school in Sighetu, Popovici says the community
has begun to understand the importance of working together to
safeguard its culture.
 
Parents have clubbed together to build an enclosure to keep the large
piles of chopped wood which heat the school through the winter, each
room equipped with a large ceramic stove.
 
Portraits of Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko dominate many
rooms as do excerpts from Ukrainian verse and songs taped to walls by
pupils. Older children have started publishing a bilingual school
newspaper.
 
Most of the 24 teachers are in their first jobs, though paedagogical
training, he says, will remedy the matter over time. For the moment,
some subjects are taught in Romanian.
 
Finding textbooks remains a problem, though the education ministry now
provides translations of some books in Ukrainian.
 
Popovici beams as he unlocks the door revealing the school's pride and
joy - 10 computers provided not by the Romanian state but by the
Polytechnical Institute in Lviv in western Ukraine.
 
"There are still plenty of problems. We need a reading room, we need
more space in general," he said. "But if there's a will in our
community, we'll find a way."
 
Popovici's bid to secure more space has run up against a common
problem in post-communist Romania - securing the return to ethnic
minorities, also including Jews and Hungarians, of property seized
under communism.
 
He has his eye on a building in central Sighetu, which has been sold
to a legal firm instead of being returned to the Ukrainian community
as ordered by a government decree.
 
Two moments stand out as the happiest in his life: Ukraine's 1991
proclamation of independence from Soviet rule and the 1996 election
victory in Romania of centrists over leftists who had been in power
since the 1989 anti-communist revolution.
 
"The first was naturally joyful. For me it meant the end of 350 years
of domination of Ukraine by a foreign power," he said.
 
"As for the second, the minute the leftists were out we started making
progress on getting papers for the school after so much foot dragging.
It made all our dreams possible."

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