The administrative centre of the Bliznyuky community in the Kharkiv region
Bliznyuky
A village whose history has always wandered between fiction and truth.
Equidistant, special, distinctive, alive. A village whose history has always wandered between fiction and truth.
Here kurgans (burial mounds) became legends, a railway station gave the village its name, and the local speech still sounds like the Ukrainian east. Explore the map of the Bliznyuky region together with us.
- 401archaeological sites across the community's lands
- ≈200nomadic burials in the Bliznyuky steppe
- 1860stwo villages came together by the railway station
- 2twin kurgans gave the village its name
History
Before Bliznyuky became what we know today, these lands had already seen a great deal. People have lived here since ancient times, as confirmed by the research of the Kharkiv Museum and an expedition of the Centre for the Protection of Cultural Heritage at the Culture Department of the Kharkiv Regional State Administration. Viktor Didyk used to say that we have been here since the Upper Palaeolithic, III BC — and that is quite a while ago.
This place saw many settlements of Ukraine's steppe peoples. They left traces that are still visible today: a full 401 kurgans and settlements of the Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age. Nomadic burials are the easiest to find here — there are around 200 of them. Not many rich objects have survived from those times, because the craft of tomb-raiders in our parts is, it seems, also age-old. But small, isolated everyday items remain, such as a stone-flake fragment bearing the typical marks of working (found on the right bank of the Ternivka River, between the villages of Yakovivka and Hannivka). Most likely, as ethnographers believe, it was left behind by mammoth hunters.
After a very long stretch of time, somewhere around the 1860s two villages appeared here, Bliznyuky 1 and Bliznyuky 2, and nearby a railway station named Ndezhdyne was soon built, which burned down at the beginning of the 20th century. It was then rebuilt and named "Bliznyuky". These two twin villages quickly gravitated geographically towards this station and became a single Bliznyuky.
Legend
Why Bliznyuky (which means "twins")? It is known to be in honour of the similar legendary kurgans that stand side by side. Researchers agree with this, because these kurgans are real and very handy as landmarks when you are travelling somewhere across this endless Bliznyuky steppe. Their legendary quality lies in the fact that it is still unknown who is buried there.
So the greatest legend of the Bliznyuky region tells of graves belonging to two twin brothers, buried after a fierce battle in which they defended these lands. Some say they were Cossacks and the graves are Cossack ones. Others believe these kurgans have stood far longer. For now this tale remains a tale. And the two identical hills are still associated with our village.
This is not the only legend — it is simply the oldest. But we have newer tales too. For instance, a small pond behind the factory we jokingly call the place where children were baptised. This tale, of course, has its reasons.
Beliefs and traditions
The custom of baptising children in an unusual way really did exist, in the last century, when faith was crushed by the regime. Performing any religious rituals was strictly forbidden and even dangerous.
Traditions were saved by the fact that, despite the ban on faith in God, people of the older generation who carried spiritual knowledge kept it and passed it on to children in secret. They hid icons, baptised children secretly, in their homes, under other people's names, quietly kept up their prayers, went "rozhdestvuvaty" — sending a little boy round to greet people that Christmas had come — sang New Year carols (shchedruvaty), blessed Easter cakes (pasky) at Easter, and gathered as a family. Even in the cruellest times we came together, laid the tables, lit candles, prayed and wished one another happy holidays. That is how faith survived to this day, and how the knowledge of prayers and rites has come down to us.
A film about the heritage of Bliznyuky
To learn more about Bliznyuky, you can watch a short film we made based on our research. Prefer reading? A text version — the article "Ancient monuments of the Bliznyuky region".
Local dialect
Everywhere has its own way of speaking, and by it — as by the embroidery on a shirt collar — people were recognised. You need not even ask whose kin you are: just open your mouth, and the speech itself will tell everything.
The Soviets did teach people to be ashamed of their pronunciation and their local words — so much so that there is still a joke that once they pass Zlatopil on the way to Kharkiv, all the Bliznyuky folk start speaking Russian. It is no longer like that, and songs in our dialect are now heard across all of Ukraine thanks to Kurhan & Agregat.
Today, when you come to us, you can hear our "a" where there should be an "o" sound, and our signature word forms with no "dzh" in them: hodyu, sydyu, radyu ("I walk", "I sit", "I reckon"). We end words in "-t" rather than "-ty", as in some other regions. We rarely pronounce the letters "Ch" and "R" hard. We often speak in surzhyk (a Ukrainian-Russian mix): "stisniaius'" ("I'm shy"), "den'hi" ("money" — from "Kompleksy" by Kurhan&Agregat), "bol'nytsia" ("hospital").
- hodyu
- sydyu
- radyu
- stisniaius'
- den'hi
- bol'nytsia
It happened because the Korostovtsevs, the gentry who owned these lands in the 19th–20th centuries, were often gifted serfs from the Oryol Governorate. Languages mixed, and the local speech was born. One could talk about it for a long time, but it is worth hearing at least once in a lifetime: it will latch onto you and never let go. Because it is special, curious, distinctive, steeped in history, because it brings a warm smile and sounds like the Ukrainian east.
Articles
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The Korostovtsevs: traces of a landlord family in Dobrovillia and Uplatne
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Ancient sites of the Bliznyuky region
401 kurgans, burials of the Yamna, Catacomb and Srubna cultures, and finds left behind by mammoth hunters. What archaeologists have managed to learn about the region's most ancient past.
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Local legends and tales of the Bliznyuky region
Two twin kurgans, Cossack graves and a pond where children were “baptised”: where the tales come from and what they say about us.
