A hearty thanks to my extremely brilliant, extremely distant but kindred spirit kind of cousin, Marta Soniewicka, who approached us with the idea of publishing it, translated the text into Polish, and even hand-delivered four copies to me on Friday.
It’s true: on Friday, Marta crossed the Polish-Ukrainian border on foot and boldly ventured east of the EU. I met her on the other side, where I spent a couple hours hanging out in my car, avoiding the smugglers and border drunks. We hightailed it back to L’viv for a photography exhibit opening and a decadent Georgian meal.
On my 28th birthday, Marta and I pilgrimaged to the village and town of Upper and Lower “Syn'ovydne” (Synewidzko/Synewodzko in Polish) in the foothills of the Carpathians - from where we may or may not take our common last name. Marta, whose interest in genealogy and thoroughness as a researcher reunited our disparate family branches in the 1990s, tells that Synevydne was founded in the 12th century (the oldest tombstones we found were from the mid-19th), translates as “blue water” in proto-Ruthenian (the waters of the Striy and Opir rivers really were blue on Saturday), and that our distant ancestors were large landholders - and since large landholders often took the names of the places where they lived as surnames, this gave a shade of credence to the otherwise lark-like expedition on which we embarked. It was fun, anyway.
We spent the night in the nearby idyllic Carpathian town of Slavsk, hiked to the top of a mountain, dined on marinated vegetables, banosh, and a little horilka, and then steamed in the private banya of the Boyko home in which we stayed the night. I was in bed, sleeping on a post-birthday, post-banya, post-feast cloud, by 10:30 PM. No complaints.
