June 24, 2007
Travel
MISSED THE BOAT? CRIMEA RIVER!
UKRAINE: Think of Fiddler on the Roof with tour-group cast
 |
| Stone lion guards Crimea’s Vorontsov Palace, where British Prime Minister Winston Churchill stayed during the 1945 Yalta Conference. —LISA MALLIN |
By Lorne Mallin
Special to The Province
Sailing down the Dnieper River from the Ukrainian capital to the Black Sea was an extraordinary journey of discovery for passengers on the first Klezmer Heritage Cruise.
Klezmer is Eastern European Jewish music — think Fiddler on the Roof — and its melodies flowed through the 12-day voyage from the international band on board and the local musicians who played concerts with them at ports along the way.
On the cruise ship, we sang, danced, laughed and cried. On land, we explored ancient and modern Ukraine, whose 46.5 million people have yet to really experience mass tourism since it declared independence 16 years ago as the Soviet Union crumbled.
About the size of Alberta (home of almost 300,000 Ukrainian-Canadians), it’s vast in European terms, bordering on Belarus to the north, Russia to the north and east, with a host of countries on the west – Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Moldova, and Black Sea to the south.
Almost all of the 160 passengers were Jewish, with most from Canada, plus Americans and a few from Europe and Israel. Throughout Ukraine, we visited synagogues, Jewish day schools and other sites that have been revived since the end of the Soviet era.
The trip was the brainchild of Marc and AC Dolgin, of the Ottawa area, and their Montreal musician son Josh. Two years ago, they joined a Mennonite heritage cruise on the Dnieper and visited the birthplace of Marc’s father Joseph in Zaporozhye, about 700 kilometres southeast of Kiev. Josh was inspired to propose a Jewish heritage cruise complete with klezmer music.
When the cruise was announced, my daughter Lisa, who works near Tokyo, and I were inspired to sign on, and also to book private excursions to explore our roots.
My grandfather Louis Mallin’s name was Malinsky — which means “from Malin” — before he arrived in Winnipeg in 1913 from England, but we’re not certain where he was born. In the town of Malin, about 85 km west of Kiev, we met and wonderfully connected with Jews from Malinsky families. On the other hand, 180 km southeast of Zaporozhye in the village of Alexeyevka, where we know my mother’s father, Abraham Shuer, was born, there are no more Jews and only three headstones survive in the vanishing Jewish cemetery.
 |
| Above is a typical house in Alexeyevka, a village in the southern Ukraine where the photographer's greatgrandfather, Abraham Shuer, was born. LISA MALLIN — FOR THE PROVINCE |
But you don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy discovering Ukraine. I arrived in Kiev five days before the cruise began and settled into the apartment I’d rented over the Internet, a much better deal at $59 US a night than hotel rooms. It was an excellent base to explore the 1,400-year-old capital of 2.6 million. The beautiful European city is modernizing but I had little interest in its new shopping malls and office towers, except to check into an Internet cafe. Instead, I focused on its gold-domed churches and cathedrals — many of which have been gloriously restored in the last 16 years — other historical sites and people-watching.
The spiritual centre of Ukraine’s Orthodox Christianity is Pechersk Lavra, which began as a cave monastery in 1051. Below ground are narrow tunnels housing the mummified remains of monks and saints, as well as several chapels. Above ground are magnificent churches and museums.
In the historic riverfront Podol district, the Chernobyl Museum movingly documents the human cost of the world’s worst nuclear disaster — the 1986 reactor explosion at Chernobyl, 100 km north of Kiev.
  | ||||
A Kiev busker plays his bandura, a traditional Ukrainian instrument. LORNE MALLIN — FOR THE PROVINCE
|
I visited Independence Square on Kiev’s main downtown street, Kreshchatyk, where 2004’s Orange Revolution led to President Victor Yushchenko’s election and many unfulfilled expectations. While I was here, it was continually occupied by flag-waving political groups. A little farther down Kreshchatyk, Lisa and I saw disturbing anti-Semitic graffiti outside a McDonald’s.
With the cruise group, we spent solemn moments at the memorial at Babi Yar, the ravine in Kiev where more than 33,000 Jews were machine-gunned to death in two days by the invading Nazis in 1941.
As we sailed down the 2,290-km Dnieper, we were treated to absorbing historical backgrounders by Prof. Eugene Orenstein of McGill University. Most every night, movies about Ukraine were screened. Amateur musicians jammed, singers formed a Yiddish choir and Jewish folk dancing was taught.
The four-deck Dnieper Princess was our home — 423 feet long with small but efficient twin cabins. We were well-fed in the dining rooms and enjoyed many music-filled nights in the lounges. Out on the decks, landscapes of cities, factories, villages and green fields passed before us.
Every morning, we were greeted on the PA system by Vancouver’s Elie Dolgin, a grad student at Edinburgh University, who peppered his announcements with puns such as “Ukraine, you saw, you conquered,” “Cossack it to me” and “Crimea river.”
Most every day in port, we climbed on tour buses. Some highlights:
■ In our first port of call, Dnepropetrovsk, the Museum of History’s chilling exhibit on the abuses of the Stalin regime in the 1930s and 1940s.
■ The Cossack show with great horsemanship and fine bull-whip skills on Khortitsa Island off Zaporozhye.
■ In the Crimea on the Black Sea, the Livadia Palace where Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt met for the 1945 Yalta Conference to decide the fate of post-War Europe.
■Diverse Evpatoria, which includes Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sufi dervishes and Karaites, an ethnic Turkic community whose religion is similar to Judaism.
■ The 18th-century palace of the last of the Tatar Khans, in Bakhchiserai. We also explored on our own.
My most telling moment was in Odessa, on May 9, Victory Day, marking Germany’s 1945 defeat ending the Great Patriotic War. I came upon a monument to the Soviets’ disastrous 1979- 1989 war in Afghanistan. People laid flowers at the feet of a statue of a soldier, his arms resting on his knees, his face sad and weary.
If you go
■ Canadians don’t need a visa.
■ Air Canada and partner Lufthansa fly through Toronto and Frankfurt to Kiev. Fares start around $1,500 return from Vancouver.
■ There are no plans for another Klezmer Heritage Cruise but there is an annual Mennonite Heritage Cruise (www.vision2000.ca) and many other cruises by the Dnieper Princess’s owners, Chervona Ruta (ruta-cruise.com/en/), from about $1,300.
■ Lonely Planet Ukraine and Ukraine: The Bradt Travel Guide are excellent resources.
■ Check the guide books for apartment rentals. I recommend Ukraine Apartments at www.uaapartments. com.
■ For Ukrainian food in Kiev, point at what you want at a branch of the inviting Puzata Khata cafeterias. I paid about $5 for a full-course meal.
■ Virtually all the signs in Ukraine are in the Cyrillic alphabet, which includes Latin, Greek and Hebrew-derived letters, and it’s not rocket science to learn.
■ The money is called hryvnias or UAH. About 4.75 UAH per $1 Cdn. You can use debit cards in ATMs.
1 comment:
Interesting to know.
Post a Comment