Ukrainian American scholar launches project to preserve Chornobyl region's cultural heritage (08/08/04)

Ukrainian American scholar launches project to preserve Chornobyl region's cultural heritage

by Andrew Nynka

PARSIPPANY, N.J. - A Ukrainian American scholar has launched a long-term project to preserve the cultural heritage of "the cradle of Slavic culture," a lowland region of Ukraine sparsely studied by ethnographers and largely devastated by the nuclear catastrophe at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant.

"The impacts [of Chornobyl] on the historical and cultural heritage of the region have almost never been discussed," Myron Stachiw, director of the project to preserve Polissia's unique cultural heritage, told The Ukrainian Weekly on July 23.

In the aftermath of the 1986 nuclear accident, international aid organizations and Ukrainian officials dealt chiefly with health and ecological problems associated with the nuclear fallout, while relatively little has been done to preserve the cultural identity of the region, which has seen many of its citizens who once lived near Chornobyl scattered throughout Ukraine.

An associate professor of historic preservation at Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I., Mr. Stachiw believes the region has been overlooked by ethnographers. And while data was collected there in the years following the accident, he said little has been done to study it or examine the methods used to collect it.

A number of Ukrainian scholars who worked in Polissia from 1988 to 1998 collected and preserved a "vast archive of documentary and artifactual materials," Mr. Stachiw said. "Thousands of photographs, measured drawings of buildings and villages, hundreds of audio and video tapes have been collected and have undergone, in most cases, only superficial analysis," Mr. Stachiw wrote in a summary of his project.

Titled "Rescuing Cultural Heritage after Ecological Disaster: Chornobyl and Cultural Heritage in Ukraine," Mr. Stachiw's project will "review these collections, generate inventories, assess the methods under which the collection occurred, its preservation, and curation." He is concerned that not everything in the region has been properly documented and said he would "explore the process by which decisions were made" when data was first collected.

Obstacles to preservation

Additionally, he fears other factors have worked against preservation. Looters have reportedly been active in the region, and their bounty stripped Polissia of the artifacts ethnographers often use to document a region's cultural heritage. Buildings, left unoccupied for nearly 20 years, are deteriorating and falling apart, Mr. Stachiw added.

"Ironically, because it was the least threatened of the various ethnographic subregions of Ukraine, ... it received the least systematic study by ethnographers, folklorists, and other scholars during the middle decades of the 20th century," Mr. Stachiw wrote.

An area of northwestern Ukraine roughly the size of the state of Maine, Polissia is known for its old-growth forests rich with mushrooms, berries and medicinal herbs. The people who once lived there were said to have depended strongly on the forest and land, which, in turn, "resulted in the very specific spiritual and material culture of the Ukrainian Polissia region," Mr. Stachiw said. The "inaccessible terrain protected the inhabitants from invasion and isolated them from foreign influences," according to the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, leaving the region with a distinct culture.

Though efforts at preservation have been meager, the region's historical importance has grown. "Recent historical studies of the Slavs (Barford 2001) have identified the Polissia region as the cradle of Slavic culture, adding tremendous significance to the ethno-history of the region, and multiplying the tragic effects of the relocation of a large portion of the region's population from its physical and psychological landscapes, effectively ending the continuation of centuries-old traditions, crafts, and agricultural practices, and rituals that were often intimately tied to place," Mr. Stachiw said in his summary.

But the project is not rooted exclusively in preserving the past. "It will happen again," Mr. Stachiw said, referring to the possibility that nuclear fallout could occur in the future. "Whether it's a bomb or another reactor accident, it's inevitable."

The effort to document Polissia's cultural heritage "represents one of the few, if not only, such systematic effort by a national government to preserve - rescue - an important and significant part of its cultural heritage from extinction," Mr. Stachiw explained in his project summary, and said that that example could be used to prepare for a future nuclear situation.

Awarded Fulbright fellowship

A member of Ukrainian National Association Branch 59, Mr. Stachiw was most recently awarded a Fulbright Research Fellowship to begin the first phase of his work in Ukraine. The fellowship will send him to Kyiv and Lviv from November 2004 to June 2005.

A historian, archaeologist and architectural historian, Mr. Stachiw has focused his professional career primarily on early American history. However, since 1989, he has been involved in studies of Ukrainian museums, material culture and history. He has traveled extensively in Ukraine, and participated in several scholarly exchanges and tours.

Academics from the Lviv-based Ethnology Institute at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine will help Mr. Stachiw evaluate much of the data. Dr. Mykhailo Hlushko, senior ethnographer at the institute, and Stepan Pavliuk, the institute's director, were instrumental in the initial expeditions in Polissia from 1988 to 1998, and will continue to work with Mr. Stachiw.

Three-part project

Originally, Mr. Stachiw planned to unveil the findings from the first component of his three-part project - an exhibition - in Lviv in April 2006. Although it was scheduled to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the reactor explosion, the exhibit is more likely to open a year or two later, he said.

A bilingual exhibition, it "will present a chronology of the accident at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant and discuss the known political, economic and health impacts of the disaster and its aftermath on Ukraine and the Soviet Union," and will include a special focus devoted to "the almost never discussed issue of the impacts on the historical and cultural heritage of this region of Ukraine."

The second component of Mr. Stachiw's Project will be a one-hour documentary film that will "explore the nature and chronology of the power plant accident and the response of the Soviet authorities to the catastrophe, including evacuation and relocation of large segments of the impacted region's population."

"The results of the proposed research program will be disseminated through lectures, publications in scholarly and popular journals, papers presented at conferences, and in the classroom. Ultimately, the information and conclusions will be incorporated into the planned exhibition and documentary film," Mr. Stachiw said. He hopes to also provide video and audio recordings that would contain some of the "thousands of photographs, measure drawings, images of recovered objects, stories, music, etc., of the cultural heritage of the impacted Polissia region to scholars and the public worldwide."

The final component of the project will be "a web-based information portal to allow the dissemination of information on the Ukrainian effort at cultural rescue." He said the website would allow people to see materials collected during a decade of fieldwork, including "hundreds of hours of audio recordings with former and returned residents about folk practices of celebration, healing and medical practices, religious rituals, craft practices, traditional fishing, hunting and farming practices, folk tales, etc."

But getting funding for the approximately $580,000 project has only just begun, Mr. Stachiw said. To date he has received the financial support of several Ukrainian American organizations. Both the New England Federal Credit Union in Hartford, Conn., and the Selfreliance (N.Y.) Credit Union have already provided their financial support. Additionally, he hopes to tap into a number of American sources, among them the Trust for Mutual Understanding, the MacArthur Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Advisory board tapped

Mr. Stachiw has assembled an advisory board that will help develop, review and evaluate the thematic content of the project. The ultimate evaluation will occur in the public viewing of the exhibition and documentary film in 2006.

The members of the advisory board, considered by Mr. Stachiw to be among the world's leading scholars of Ukraine and the Chornobyl catastrophe, include Yurii Shcherbak, a writer and the former ambassador of Ukraine to the United States, Canada, Israel and Mexico; Dr. David Marples, a member of the faculty at the University of Alberta and the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies; Dr. Taras Kuzio, currently a visiting professor at the Elliot School of International Affairs at the George Washington University; Dr. Roman Szporluk, director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University and member of the faculty of the history department at Harvard; Dr. Alexander Motyl, professor of political science and deputy director of the Center for Global Change and Governance at Rutgers University; Dr. Jane Dawson, a member of the faculty at Connecticut College who is currently working on a study with implications on the achievement of domestic and international environmental policy objectives.

The advisory board also includes Alexander Kuzma, executive director of the Children of Chornobyl Relief Fund; Dr. Gerald Pocius, university research professor and director of the Center for Material Culture Studies at St. John's University; Dr. Myroslav Popovych, a philosopher, political scholar and a leading Ukrainian intellectual, who is also director of the National Institute of Philosophy, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; Lina Kostenko, a prominent and prolific Ukrainian poet, scientist, and author; Dr. Yuri Shapoval, who heads the Kyiv-based Center for Historical and Political Studies at the Institute of Political and Ethnonational Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; Stepan Pavliuk, director of the Lviv-based Institute of Ethnology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; and Mykhailo Hlushko, chief ethnographer at the Institute of Ethnology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

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