Ukraine List

Ukraine List [http://www.ukrainelist.com] A web portal and information consolidator for expats and travelers in Ukraine. Main menu: Home About Our Service Travel Store Need Translation? 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There are hundreds of website reviews and summaries contained in over one hundred pages. I have done my best to evaluate which websites are good and save you some time, so I hope this site serves you well. Use the site search function to the right, try out the new custom Google search , or just navigate the many useful pages/categories. Of course you can always just read the blog too. Thanks for visiting and have fun exploring Ukraine. _______________ Posted: September 30th, 2006 under Website Info , General . Comments: none Bridge Opens to Romania In mid-January, the new bridge between Solotvino, Ukraine and Sighet, Romania officially opened with Victor Yushchenko and the President of Romania, Traian Basescu, on hand for the ceremony. The original bridge over the Tysa River was built when the area belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but it was later destroyed by the Germans during World War II. Prior to 1944, a 60 km span of the Tysa River had eleven rail and vehicle bridges crossing the river, but only two rail bridges survived the war and none allowed vehicle or pedestrian traffic. Unfortunately, the post-war political situation proved a more enduring barrier than the actual river for the largely Romanian communities on both sides of the river. After the war, the northern area became part of the Soviet Union, and the southern area became part of Romania. Family, cultural, and economic ties essentially remained cut for decades. One would have thought that the dissolution of the Soviet Union and an independent Ukraine would have restored the bridge connection, but only after fifteen years did that happen. A combination of a lack of funds and international complications contributed to the delay. Even after the funds were raised and the bridge rebuilt, it took several years for people and vehicles to finally cross the bridge. The latest complication involved how to handle commercial and human traffic (read: customs and visas) between Ukraine and the soon-to-be EU member state of Romania. By the way, it appears as if Ukrainians will get free visas and eventually Romanians will be able to travel to Ukraine without a visa. The bridge was even the subject of a documentary by Romanian director, Ileana Stanculescu, called appropriately The Bridge . The short (75 min.) film came out in 2004 and documents the absurdity of a situation where friends and family have been separated for decades leaving people to literally communicate by shouting over the river. To their credit, the townsfolk took it upon themselves to design, raise funds, and then help build the longest wooden international bridge in Europe. The European Union’s PHARE-Programme, which distributes funds to assist Eastern and Central European countries, provided the bulk of the funding. By the way, a similar situation existed in Slovakia where another town was divided and there wasn’t even a river to physically separate the two parts of town. You can read about it here . _______________ Posted: January 19th, 2007 under Carpathians , Transport , Ethnic Groups , history , Romania . Comments: none The Decline of BRAMA The BRAMA website used to be a standard for Ukraine-related information — at least from a diaspora perspective, but now if you go to any link to the website, Google along with StopBadware.org will give a prominent warning that says, “Visiting this web site may harm your computer.” That’s pretty effective for me not to visit the site. By the way, don’t worry about the BRAMA link above if you want to check it out; it will only take you to the Google warning page. I should also note that I couldn’t find on the StopBadware site the exact reason why BRAMA has a warning. That’s too bad. Of course, BRAMA had been in decline for some time, and the site’s general organization is a bit ’stale’ to say the least. Also, the site’s once vibrant forum is now dead with no posts since the spring of 2006. It basically looks like no one is working the site to moderate and approve comments/postings. With that said, it is unfortunate that the wealth of archived information on the site is now effectively off limits as most people won’t feel comfortable browsing or searching BRAMA. Hopefully the webmaster will correct the problem in the near future and the visitors can once again return. Frankly, I don’t think those ‘running’ the site are malicious, but it very well could be that others who are malicious may be taking advantage of poor maintenance or using BRAMA to spread harmful files. Please note that in the next couple of days, I will do a search of links on ukrainelist.com to make sure that some warning is attached to all BRAMA links, and if the content is relevant to a blog post, I will try to retrieve the information and temporarily host it until this issue is resolved. _______________ Posted: January 17th, 2007 under Website Info . Comments: none Yaroslava’s Tales The Ukrainian-American illustrator, Yaroslava Surmach-Mills, was born in New York in 1925. Her father, Myron Surmach, was born in Galicia in 1893, but later emigrated to Pennsylvania and then to New York. In America Myron became involved in everything from music, publishing, and books and started a Ukrainian book and music store called Surma that survives to this day in New York City. His daughter, Yaroslava, (this is her shortened pen name too) went on to become a well-known illustrator of children’s books, but was also a painter, an educator, an author, and — by marriage — the wife of famous American sociologist C. Wright Mills . Yaroslava often used Ukrainian folk tales in her children’s stories and her illustrations utilized traditional Ukrainian imagery. Probably her most famous book, The Mitten , was illustrated by her and written by Alvin Tresselt. It tells of a boy who loses his mitten and the forest animals that then take refuge in it from the cold — until the mitten bursts at its seams that is. Yaroslava also drew on other Ukrainian stories for her children’s books. Ivanko and the Dragon as well as Tusya and the Pot of Gold are adapted from Ukrainian folk tales. Ivanko involves a stick that comes to life (a la Pinocchio) and then gets involved in a game of outwitting a dragon. And Tusya is a story of a gossipy wife and a man trying to keep secret the existence of a pot of gold from a landowner. Yaroslava also has a story called An Egg is for Wishing that is about pysanky. (this and other Ivanko images are on lab-curio.com ) As an artist, Yaroslava does a lot of reverse-glass painting, which has a long tradition in Ukraine. Below are a few examples. Also, if you want to read more about Yaroslava’s father, Myron Surmach, this site has an interesting account of his involvement with Ukrainian music in the early 1900s in America. (reverse glass painting, artukraine.com . There are three pages of her paintings on the site) (reverse glass painting, oseredok.org ) (reverse glass painting, stnicholas.kids.us ) _______________ Posted: January 17th, 2007 under Books , Art . Comments: none Black Sea Dolphin Therapy About a week ago I read this story about a pod of dolphins attacking a swimmer in the Black Sea, so I thought I would do a post on Black Sea bottlenose dolphins. Of course, it didn’t take much searching the web to see that the Black Sea dolphin was not fairing well considering sea pollution, over fishing, and the difficulty of managing the environmental polices of multiple countries that have Black Sea coastline. With that said, what I did find interesting was how some former trained dolphins for the military are now being used for Dolphin-Assisted Therapy (DAT) in the Crimea. The claim is that interacting with dolphins in the water can be beneficial in developing cognitive and social-emotional behaviors, especially for younger children with disabilities. But this type of therapy is also used for numerous other problems, such as chronic fatigue, phobias, verbal stammering, and deafness. This article even talks about a Ukrainian orphanage using dolphins to cure bed wetting problems. Of course, there are many skeptics , but a lot of reports ( here’s one from BBC ) also attest to positive results. Regardless, of this effectiveness debate, dolphins are just one type of animal that is increasingly used in a field of animal-assisted therapy. (both photos from dolphinassistedtherapy.com) Before these dolphins became ‘therapists’ though, many were trained to serve a military purpose: detect mines, identify ships, struggle with enemy divers by taking off masks and cutting cords, and maybe even deploying explosives. This site even talks about how the Soviets had special parachute harnesses to drop them into a location. But now that the need for such dolphin skills is diminished and funding isn’t available, the dolphin ’soldiers’ have had to look elsewhere for support. Many of the dolphins ended up being exported to aquariums around the world, and in one case, the BBC noted that a group of military dolphins and their trainer relocated to Iran for an unknown purpose. There has even been some evidence that wild dolphins were being caught and passed off as ex-military dolphins during sales. Regardless, an additional risk is that many dolphins end up dying in transit or shortly after arrival to new aquariums, thus making the dolphin trade that much more worrisome. On the positive side, however, many of the highly trained dolphins have been re-trained and folded into a dolphin therapy business around Sevastopol ( here is one website ). According to the site, the resident specialist, Dr. Lukina, was the first scientist in the world to receive her doctoral degree based upon research on dolphin-assisted therapy. Another therapy center is located at the Oceanarium in Sevastopol with yet another dolphin center located in Yevpatoriya. Further Reading This transcript on Foreign Correspondent includes interviews with several people involved in Ukraine’s dolphin programs (both past and present). This site gives a summary of the conservation challenges for Black Sea dolphins. MyUkraine has a list of aquariums with dolphins in the Crimea. This site has an academic review of the benefits (or lack of) for dolphin-assisted therapy. Though it is a bit dated, this report gives a lot of detail on the Black Sea dolphin trade in the ’90s. _______________ Posted: January 16th, 2007 under Crimea , Health . Comments: none Playing Accordion in Ukraine I thought this was an excellent photo of an accordion player playing in the Kyiv metro. It was taken by Neil Navneet and is on TrekEarth. Of course this accordion has keys, but many musicians in Ukraine play what’s called the bayan — or button accordion. This site , says that the accordion originally came from Germany to Russia in the 1830s, then in 1907 a St. Petersburg instrument maker, P. Sterlingov, created the bayan. Later in the 1920s, the bayan was introduced into eastern Ukraine, and after WWII it spread to the other parts of Ukraine. If you want to get some idea of how the bayan developed and became a mainstream instrument in Ukraine, this site has an interview with one of the great bayan players of the former USSR, Nikolai Chaikin. He was born in Kharkhov, and talks about the rise of the instrument. He also mentions that he played the bayan all along the front lines during WWII, no doubt increasing the exposure of the instrument. Chaikin died in Moscow in 2000. Here is a photo from one of Carpetblogger’s Flickr sets showing a bayan player in the snow. The name ‘bayan’ comes from the legendary bard of Kievan Rus’, Boyan . Apparently, he was the bard for the court of Yaroslav the Wise who ruled in the 11th century, but one of the only historical mentions of Boyan is in the medieval poem called The Song of Igor’s Campaign , so there isn’t a lot to go on. This site gives a good summary of who Boyan may have been, and here is Vladimir Nabokov’s translation of the medieval poem. Regardless of the debate, the instrument was named after the Kievan Rus’ bard. Recently, however, people have been increasingly calling it an accordion too, but there are differences between an accordion and a bayan. Of course it has buttons instead of keys, but the internal reed structure is different too. Additionally, the bayan has a fuller bass sound and the range and purity of its tone is supposedly better, thus making it a choice for many concert players. If you want to hear some bayan playing, Talent Aid has a young player named Oleksiy Titov on its site, and you can also make a donation for him to buy a new concert bayan if you want. Another good source is the site for Volodymyr Kurylenko . He takes his music seriously, has some mp3 samples, and also has projects supporting other bayan players and Ukrainian folk artists. _______________ Posted: January 10th, 2007 under Music , Photos , Entertainment , history . Comments: none Chernobyl, Google, and eBay This photo of Pripyat is quite amazing. The photographer by the alias of “Astro-Chimp” has embellished it in such a way that it looks like a miniature, snowy (but radiated) city. I would really recommend looking at the rest of his photo set too. They are all miniature-like photos that are quite interesting. I guess the only problem I have with the photo is that by miniaturizing it, it seems less real; Chernobyl is still very real. Anyhow, that doesn’t detract from the fact it is a very well-done photo. By the way, here is the original photo of Pripyat that the photographer used. I don’t know who should be credited for it. Also, another interesting site is Tagzania . It uses Google Earth to view Pripyat and the Chernobyl reactor. Some of the reactor site hyperlinks are not accurate, but if you click around you can see the reactor, the abandoned ferris wheel, or just drag the image around to look at other things using the satellite image. Lastly, I will put here the link for Pripyat.com , which has a lot of interesting information about Chernobyl and is well worth checking out if you are interested in this subject. They used to have a ‘radioactive store’ that sold merchandise with radioactive symbols on it, but it seems to have been removed. I guess taste has caught up with Chernobyl only 20 years after the fact. Oh wait…. There was an eBay auction of two 3rd grade writing books retrieved from the exclusion zone (only three miles from the reactor). Ok, the auction itself seems to be rather idiotic and only begs the question why someone would take irradiated books home with them, but to answer that question just look at the money. The base starting bid was set at (US) $26,486, and the ‘buy now bid’ was $80,000. By the way, the auctioneer said the amount was ’symbolic’ — get it? (26 April 86 = 26,486) Anyhow, the person auctioning these items was from Athens, Greece, and the auction ended without any bids. Maybe it was shut down after complaints. Regardless, it is sort of nice that the guy has to sit on some irradiated school books for a bit longer. _______________ Posted: January 9th, 2007 under Chernobyl , Photos . Comments: none Russian Rocket Lands in US…sort of I usually don’t put non-Ukrainian material on this site, but I found this video footage of Russian space junk reentering the atmosphere pretty spectacular. It entered the Earth’s atmosphere over Wyoming and then traveled south over Colorado and ended up in New Mexico. You can see the debris path here . Space junk isn’t unusual, but it often drops in the ocean and is rarely caught on video. According to NORAD, the debris was apparently the second stage of an SL-4 rocket launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on December 27th. The payload of the rocket was a French satellite called COROT that will search for small, rocky earth-like planets in other solar systems . You can read more about this launch and satellite at russianspaceweb.com . Just a note, the Fox news team in the video incorrectly attributes the atmospheric light show to an extinct constellation. _______________ Posted: January 6th, 2007 under Uncategorized . 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