#THE ITS VERY VILLAGE VOICEY FULL#

We came back to our senses somewhere in the school garden and agreed that we would never, under any circumstances, ever tell anyone about it.” I don’t remember how we ended up back on the street, I think, but we all squeezed through the window at the same time. We were looking at these candles with bated breath but then suddenly we heard someone as if sighing and crying softly.

#THE ITS VERY VILLAGE VOICEY FULL#

What we saw in front of the altar was a candle stand full of burning candles. I remember it was so terrifying it gave me the creeps, but we made up our minds anyway and managed to get in through a window located quite high up. Then, one day, my buddies and I decided to sneak in and take a look. At first it had a huge padlock on its doors, but everything stayed secure inside for a long time. But when the Germans were “kicked out” the Communists closed it again. The Germans, of course, had their own goal for acting this way-hoping to win the support, as they put it, of the local population. When the Germans entered the village, they reopened the church and the services were held there once again. “The first time was in the 1930s, and the man who climbed up and took down the cross was the first of the villagers to be killed in the war that started soon after. “The church has been closed twice,” said Uncle Tima. The man who climbed up and threw down the church cross was soon the first one of the villagers to be killed in the war that broke out soon after. One of them, having to do with the church (and it was of little interest to me at the time), I somehow remembered practically word for word.

He couldn’t remember any other substantial details about it except that he was quite “taken” by the singing of the church choir.īut his younger brother Timofey, apparently out of nostalgia (as a young man, we had a Komsomol-sponsored trip to the mines in the Donbass, where he started a family and stayed forever), once told me some stories from his childhood. Then from Radichev, the nearest landing place, it was taken to the village on a cart driven by a team of six horses.

Gifted to the church by “a certain princess”, it was taken down the Desna River on a large raft built specifically for the purpose. My eldest uncle, Alexander, who, as a five-year-old boy accompanied my mother to church services there, vaguely remembered that its iconostasis was very high and unspeakably beautiful.

The church was built, as it should be, in the most attractive place-upon the hill in the center of the village-and it was considered one of the largest and most important local churches. “ Candles burning inside the shut down church” One of the old-timers claimed that the village was founded by the descendants of the Zaporozhye or Don Cossacks, and the name of the Ivan’kovka church confirms it: It was named in honor of the Protection Icon of the Mother of God, which the Cossacks have revered for a long time. Anyway, the name worked out quite well, because until recently there were quite a few Ivans residing in the village.

Most likely he didn’t come alone, or he wasn’t the only one called by this name. It was attractive to him, and so he decided to stay here forever. In every part of the vast Slavic-Russian land, the diminutive of this name could have varied: Vanya, Ivanko, Ivanya, Ivas’ and I imagined how, in days of old, a certain Ivanko-Ivanya traveled through this area. Its name has always sounded somewhat mellow (probably because of the soft sign 1 in the middle of the word), something really familial, of your own but it could also be because my father and two grandfathers all happened to be named Ivan. Nicholas monastery, to which the village was assigned in 1589, tell us, but there is speculation that it was founded before the Mongol invasions. At least, that’s what the records of the Rykhlov St. Bedecked with four willow-lined ponds, Ivan’kovo was probably about five hundred years old. Spread out on one side over a vast plain and framed by fields and mixed forests of birch, pine, and oak, its opposite part stretches over picturesque green ravines, rather steep here and there, but nevertheless densely lined with whitewashed houses, surrounded on their part with orchards and gardens filled to the brim with all kinds of garden crops. The village of Ivan’kovo, where God willed me to be born, tucked some distance away from the major roads of the ancient Chernigov-Novgorod-Seversk land, lies comfortably wrapped by the peaceful and soothing landscape of Little Russia.

The its very village voicey