Despite oppression, choirmaster fights to maintain national rites for Ukrainians residing in Slovakia
of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, that accusation could easily have earned him a death sentence. But the court, having considered his age, sentenced Dovhovych to 10 years at hard labor instead.
Dovhovych was 14 years old.
Music would later become Dovhovych’s key weapon, both in the Siberian camps and the emigration that followed. Today, the 67‑year‑old choirmaster and conductor lives in Kosice, Slovakia, and spearheads a drive to preserve a sense of national identity for the thousands of Ukrainians scattered around Europe.
“The national cause is in the first place for me,” he said. “Friends often call me a fanatic.”
Dovhovych is the head of the European Congress of Ukrainians, and deputy head of the World Congress of Ukrainians. But that’s not what has earned him recognition.
Among Ukrainian ex‑pats in Slovakia and abroad, he is better known for his Malanka festivals in Kosice. Malanka, also known as the Old New Year, is marked on Jan. 13, the Orthodox St. Melania’s Day. The celebration includes dress‑up shows, caroling and a holiday dinner consisting of 12 dishes.
The first attempt to hold a Malanka festival took place in Kosice in 1968, but was immediately banned by local authorities. In 1990, Dovhovych and his wife Olena re‑established the celebration.
Their Malanka celebration has attracted as many as 750 Ukrainians every year since. Guests come from as far as Belgium, Germany and England to listen to the concert, eat traditional food and mingle.
“It is the year’s merriest celebration,” said Zoreslava Koval from Munich. “It’s so wonderful to be with other Ukrainians, take part in the rituals that we do not observe in daily life, but that are deep in our heart from our ancestors.”
“They tell me in Lviv, in London ‘Levko, come make such a great Malanka for us as well!’” bragged Dovhovych.
Dovhovych has experience in organizing parties. In 1955, he was among the prisoners who organized the celebration of Epiphany in a Siberian labor camp. Priests served a liturgy, and more than 200 people took the communion, he said. Though the celebration was a clear violation of prison rules, the guards wouldn’t stop them, he said.
“They were afraid of us,” said Dovhovych, laughing. “We were those ‘nationalist bandits’ capable of anything.”
Dovhovych was born in Uzhgorod, then part of Czechoslovakia, in 1935. When Western Ukraine was annexed into the Soviet Union after World War II, his father, a priest, was forced to flee to Czechoslovakia by agents of the KGB’s predecessor, the NKVD.
“It was a terrible time,” recalls Klara Baloh, a Dovhovych friend and Uzhgorod musician. “We used to live in a civilized, God‑fearing state. The new system seemed completely barbarian to us.”
Several years afterwards, Dovho‑ vych was accused of siding with an anti‑Soviet organization and of betraying the Soviet Union.
“It was a farce, a way of psychological pressure on the people,” recalls Dovhovych.
He spent his youth in Siberian coal mines, where he met a number of prominent musicians among the political prisoners.
Dovhovych’s fellow inmates included Stepan Chornenky, a soloist at the Lviv Opera and a tenor at Italy’s famous La Scala Theater, Leonid Ischenko, the chief conductor of the Odessa Opera and Leo Kalmit, the director of Estonia’s National Theater. The masters taught Dovhovych how to conduct, and how to become a choirmaster.
“I was learning to live in the gulags,” he said.
In 1957, Dovhovych was rehabilitated. Soon after returning home, he moved to Czechoslovakia and found his family. There, he organized his first Ukrainian youth ensemble, called Vesna (spring), and later several choirs and a Ukrainian drama theater.
But Dovhovych’s enthusiasm soon attracted the attention of the local authorities in socialist Czechoslovakia, who accused him of promoting the spirit of “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” among the local youth. Dovhovych was forced to leave his choirs and engage in construction work instead. For 15 years, he worked as a foreman.
In 1985, Dovhovych was allowed to organize a Ukrainian choir. “I was told: ‘You want a Ukrainian choir – okay. But we promise that you will have lots of trouble with it.”
Undaunted, Dovhovych founded a mixed choir called Karpaty, consisting of ethnic Ukrainians. Karpaty, which celebrated its 17th anniversary this fall, performed more than 220 concerts.
Helena Lichko and her husband Andry have been singing in Karpaty from the day it was founded.
“When we found out that there was a Ukrainian choir, we became extremely excited,” Lichko said. “We craved to have something of our own, of our culture.”
Some 280 villages inhabited by ethnic Ukrainians have existed in what is now Slovakia since the days of Kyivan Rus.
In many of those villages, Dovhovych has helped establish amateur choirs and developed an education program for children’s choirs.
Dovhovych also inspired families in Slovakia’s Ukrainian‑dominated Presov region to celebrate the Shevchenko Days in March – poetry readings in honor of Ukrainian bard Taras Shevchenko.
Most guests at Dovhovych’s Malanka celebration these days speak poor Ukrainian and include few young people.
“Our national minority is becoming extinct,” said Dovhovych. “Soon we will disappear.”
In the 1960’s, there were 272 Ukrainian schools in Slovakia. Now, there are only eight. Fewer people identify themselves as Ukrainians in census, and more youth intermarry.
Dovhovych said he has no illusions of halting what he calls the natural course of events. What he is planning to do is to continue his choir’s tours and staging Malanka celebrations in Kosice.
“Yes, we are dying, and let the world know about it,” he said. “But at least we are dying with a song.”
