A Glimpse into Our Own (Mythical?) Ancestral Carpathian Past: Researchers and Writers in a Liminal Space and Time

A Glimpse into Our Own (Mythical?) Ancestral Carpathian Past: Researchers and Writers in a Liminal Space and Time

Link to presentation recording: 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1T70KOk5GN5mowS1jcc4J5N6Hlf5mzYPf/view?usp=drive_link

Presented by Patricia A. Krafcik, Ph.D.

Professor Emerita, The Evergreen State College

Olympia, Washington

At the close of World War I, the remote northern counties of the Hungarian Kingdom were added to the new country of Czechoslovakia as Subcarpathian Rus’. Many of our ancestors had already emigrated from the historic borderland territory of Carpathian Rus’ by that time. They knew what they had left behind. But much of that territory, especially its remote highland villages, was little known in the rest of the Czechoslovak Republic. Russian folklorist Petr Bogatyrev and Czech journalist and writer Ivan Olbracht, both highly educated and intensely curious, were two of many who traveled to the region during the interwar period. They immersed themselves deeply into the socio-cultural life, and from their own diverse perspectives and in accordance with their professional training, left a wealth of information which uncovered the reality of the place and its ethnic communities. Who were they? Why did they venture to the region? What did they find? What did they leave for us in their respective work?

Pat Krafcik earned her Ph.D. in Russian Literature at Columbia University; taught at the University of Pittsburgh and Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, before her over three decades of teaching at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. She is a co-founder of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center and was editor of the Carpatho-Rusyn American newsletter for 20 years (a digital copy of the entire run is archived at the C-RRC website [c-rrc.org]), provided lectures at the Studium Carpato-Ruthenorum International Summer School for Rusyn Language and Culture for nearly ten years, and through the years has written and presented on various topics relating to Carpatho-Rusyn culture.