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Dear Friends of Avantart!
Most of my lifetime I learned that I live in Central Europe, and now, after the opening of the Iron Curtain, we must understand that the real Central Europe is far more eastern: the geographical centre of Europe is located in the Carpathan Mountains in Ukraine and Poland and Ukraine belong to Central Europe.
Well, Poland changed a lot in the last 10 years and soon it will be member of the European Economic Community, but Ukraine still stays behind... a rotten economy, a big historical burden and a shaken political system... yes, there is a great european heritage, Lviv belonged to the faboulous centers of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, but this is some time ago. I saw this country as a country with many contradictions, a country which whishes to do better but which lacks a lot...
On the other side I met energetic, strong people, artists, musicians, many....
I will try to present some of my impressions here at Avantart ...
The Ukrainian Christmas is celebrated 2 weeks later than the Western Christmas and gifts are exchanged in the New Year Night. I spent this festive time in Ukraina and I got a lot of interesting impressions.
I just came back, so I just can announce the new topics for January 2001.
Many new topics from literature, music, art and every day life:
the nearly monochrome paintings of Igor Yanovich
the absurd - surrealistic works of Oleg Dergatchov
Bruno Schulz, the carpathian Kafka
the music of Yuri Yaremchuk....
The armenian church in Lviv was closed for more than 50 years, used as a store place for Ikons. Nobody could visit the church and no services could be held, a room in the tower was used for service.
But now, January 5, 2001, in the year of the jubilee of the armenian church, this wonderful building was reopened. I was lucky to see the interior, famous for the wall paintings, and I could speak with Ararat Terterian, the diakon of the church, could express my joy about the re-vitalisation of the church.
The Armenian Church in Lviv
The Lviv Weekly Journal POSTUP printed an article about the reopening
You can read it in ukrainian language here
Yuri Yaremtchukis the standard-bearer of New Music in Lviv. He cooperated with Kuryokhin, Letov, is member of the Moscow Composers Orchestra and earns his living as saxophon player in a restaurant.
Lviv is a hard place for free music. There are only few places to perform and Yuri is the only musician who plays free improvised music here.
Anastasia Yaremtchuk and Julia Yaremtchuk Yulia and Anastasia Yaremtchuk study at the Lviv Conservatory. They know free and improvised music since their childhood. Together with their father, they form the trio 3 YA.
Yuri Yaremtchuk invited Heinz-Erich Gödecke to perform to Lviv ein and organised two concerts
Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), a painting teacher in the small, at that time polish city Drohobych, became known in the west by his short stories The Street of Crocodiles, which placed him just beside Franz Kafka. Schulz, who translated Kafka into the Polish language, wrote prosa which surrealistic contents burn themselves into our memory.
More than 30 years ago, I suppose I was at school still, I read these short stories.
The memory of these dream pictures, mixed with the novels and short stories of other galician authors like
Joseph Roth or Scholem Aleichem, together with Roman Vishniac's photodocumentations of the jewish stedtl, already threatened by the holocaust, formed a strong impression of a vanished world: Galicia.
And now I came to Galicia, a region which does not exist anymore, cut into parts which belong to Poland and Ukraina today.
There is no galician population anymore: the bourgeosie emigrated or was deported, the jews were killed, the polish people were deported to Poland after WW II, nowadays mostly Ukrainians live in the former Galicia, a christian, agrarian population. They live in the big, elegant houses of cities like Lviv or Brody, the synagoges in Drogobych are used as flats or stay empty, ruined, full of human excrements, the people ignore or know only very few about the vanished culture, but from time to time some small memories flow...
So I was in Galicia. I felt a stupendous scenario of Déja vu. Literature can give you a steady ground, many impressions came to me and the absurd situations in the infamous hotel in Drogobych couldn't surprise me. It had to be like that.
So have a look at my photo reports of our journey to Galicia, to Lemberg / Lviv, to Drogobych in the Pre-Carpathian Mountains and to the Carpathian Mountains.
Rural Galicia
a Market Day in the small galician town of Drogobych. Drogobych is a very poor, grey city and the photos, which I present here, are somehow deceptive, as I was too embarrassed by the market and the poor choice of goods which were sold, and so I did not dare to make photos.
The New Synagogue in Drogobych
The wooden churches of Drogobych
Stay here - Hotel Tulstan in Drogobych
From Borislav to Turka and Strij - in the ukrainian Carpath Mountains
Oleg Dergatchov, the surrealist graphic artist and sculpturer and Igor Yanovich, whose abstract paintings give you an open heart and strong soul... both will be portrayed here at Avantart in the next time.
I am glad that I could meet them and that I could enjoy their art.
a portrait of Oleg Dergatchov
Some amusing episodes:
I learned that courageous people really enjoy the ukrainian speciality
White Fat in Chocolade
we admired the colourful fire station in the forest
and we really enjoyed the hospitality of the Drogobych Hotel Tulstan....
more about that to come...
you can now download 3 pressphotos of Sainkho Namchylak
all of them with a resolution of 300 dpi as a TIF-file
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cmg@avantart.com
Avantart's URL: http://www.avantart.com
