Uplatne

The village existed long before the landlords knew of it. As its first name — Popivka — tells us, it was a settlement where priests certainly lived. When a landlord reached the village — one about whom many stories still circulate here, and who left many traces in this place — it came to be called Korostavka. We have all guessed: it was none other than Korostovtsev, a landlord from the Katerynoslav governorate. Later, when serfdom was abolished in 1861, people paid the landlord who owned these lands for their allotments year after year. And the first village in the volost to settle up in full was this one — so it was named Platne (“Paid”), and later the letter “U” was added at the front for the sake of euphony. Uplatne was part of the ten thousand desiatinas owned by Hlib Ivanovych Korostovtsev. So life here was always in full swing!

The spiritual life of the Uplatne district holds important biographies of the people who lived here. One such story is about Volodymyr Klynovskyi, a priest who found himself in the village of Berestove. It all began in earnest: as a young man he studied at a seminary in Austro-Hungary and served under Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky himself (or Yosyp Slipyi — here the daughter knows better). Volodymyr was an archpriest of the Greek Catholic Church — but the Soviet authorities decided he had no need of such credentials and, right in the middle of a service, sent him to the camps for fifteen years.

He came back a shadow of himself, his health lost in the camps. Fleeing the regime from the West, the Klynovskyi family ended up in the Dnipropetrovsk region, and later in Berestove — a village you will no longer find on the map. Here is how it went: the village church had been destroyed, so the once-distinguished priest went to work… as an ordinary watchman on a farm, while his young wife Olena became a milkmaid. They lived poorly and dressed simply, yet the watchman’s status did not keep the locals from discovering that this was a man of an entirely different mettle. People say — and we believe them, with every reason to — that Volodymyr was a remarkably cultivated interlocutor, with whom even simple everyday matters somehow sounded especially noble.

Greatness of spirit cannot be hidden in a sack, and so, despite every prohibition, people were drawn to the watchman’s house. Some came secretly, through the gardens at dusk, to have a child baptised or an Easter cake blessed. Others came because they knew the old priest could heal and say prayers of deliverance. Curiously, the Soviet authorities left him alone here. It is whispered that even local party officials quietly came to him for help and advice — for when hardship presses, ideology is soon forgotten. Thus an archpriest meant to serve in grand cathedrals became an “invisible” saviour of ordinary villagers in times when faith was being burned out at the root.

Today Volodymyr Klynovskyi rests beside his wife in the Uplatne cemetery. He remains underappreciated to this day, though in his time he brought the light of great European culture to our steppes. And yet his story exists, and it will live as long as we remember it and tell it to one another — as proof that no regime can take away true inner freedom and faith.

Besides spiritual food, there was always delicious earthly food here too. Uplatne’s gastronomic heritage is famed for its signature borshch with “hairy peas”. Our housewives truly know how to break every template — the very name “borshch with hairy peas” says it all. Botanists will of course tell you that hairy vetchling is a common weed used as cattle feed. But in Uplatne rules were taken lightly, and behind the odd name hides ordinary chickpeas. They are soaked overnight and boiled long, and then comes the knight’s move: a good half-kilo piece of puzanyna — pork belly with its skin singed over straw — goes into the pot together with the tomato base. Before the finale the meat is taken out and served separately, while a sprig of lovage is dropped into the pot for a couple of minutes — for a wild aroma. No garlic goes into the borshch itself: its place is on the flatbreads eaten alongside this delight.