I was on the trail of another story. I’d heard about an old church hidden high in Zakarpattia’s mountains, built for an emperor who’d never visited. In an effort to set the rough wooden structure apart, local men had taken to shaking out their hair over the altar after Mass. As their region was known for its gold deposits, and most men worked in the mines, minute specs of gold dust fell from many tousled heads. Over a century of Sundays the altar and apse came to be covered with thick billows and folds of glinting gold, and the emperor caught wind of the story. Enticed by his subjects’ devotion, he made plans to visit the little church, until the outbreak of the First World War doomed both his plans and his empire.
The car climbed past smoky hazelnut trees rimmed by cool morning light, its pistons hammering like my head. Snowy footpaths ran through woods above which the branches of ancient spruces hung like mourning weeds. To keep warm I’d jacked up the heat, but still I was shivering from the cold.
Wars had torn apart this ‘meaningless fragment’ as they had all of Ukraine. In 1914 Ukrainians found themselves conscripted into opposing armies: 3.5 million serving the tsar, a quarter-million in the Austrian army. During the Russian Revolution, much of which was fought on Ukraine’s bloodlands, more than 100,000 civilians lost their lives, Kiev changing hands fourteen times in eighteen months. Ukrainians turned on each other again during the Second World War, to serve either in the Red Army or as Hilfswillige, the Nazis’ ‘willing helpers’ who arrested and massacred Jews. After the war Ukrainian patriots and collaborators alike were deported en masse, condemned to be ‘special settlers’ in Siberia.
In its search for role models, Ukraine’s latest nation-builders had decided to glorify wartime nationalists, including Stepan Bandera. Kiev wanted to use his example to rally support for its war against Moscow. Unfortunately Bandera had led the anti-Semitic ‘Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists’, which had intended to liquidate the country’s Jews. It had also massacred tens of thousands of Polish civilians in western Ukraine in 1943–44. The OUN’s ambition had been to turn Ukraine into a one-party fascist dictatorship without minorities.
But people forget or lie or fall for the propaganda, so it was not a great surprise to find Bandera gazing down at me when I stopped at a pharmacy in a no-name town. To many Ukrainians he remained a symbol of the struggle for independence during the twentieth century, despite his hateful politics. In Lviv a statue of him had been erected soon after he’d been named a Hero of Ukraine. At the same time his effigy was burned in Odessa.
Of course the town didn’t really lack a name. I simply hadn’t taken it in, my mind befuddled by the particularly nasty cold that the steaming Dnipro bath hadn’t nipped in the bud. En route to Chernivtsi – or טשערנאָוויץ or Cernăuţi – I’d managed to find neither lemons nor apple-cider vinegar, the latter being a sure-fire defence against an oncoming cough. Nor did I happen upon a ready supply of kogel-mogel, a traditional Jewish raw egg and vanilla cure-all. Thankfully the pharmacist behind the counter – and under Bandera’s flashing portrait (it was surrounded by glittering fairy lights) – was sympathetic and helpful, although she didn’t understand a word I said. I managed to communicate my symptoms by pointing at my blocked ears and clutching my aching head.
I had no idea what drug she prescribed but, as far as I could tell by miming my hands on a steering wheel, I would be safe to drive. In the Skoda I took a slug of the raspberry-flavoured liquid, then another for good measure. Along the main street came a horse-drawn cart, its workers returning from clearing snow with shovels slung over their shoulders. A Ukrainian border-patrol unit trooped past an ancient woman whose bowed pegs were wrapped in woollen leggings and felt boots. Neither the march of time nor the tramp of armies – Austrian lancers, Romanian Roşiori, Einsatzgruppen death squads and Soviet commissars – had broken her step. In the no-name town the twenty-first century seemed to have been tacked on to the past like an afterthought. Or so it seemed as I drove on, passing a wrecked Ikarus bus on the outskirts.
Ahead the road twisted higher still into the hills, through aspen forests and past frozen waterfalls. With every mile or two another isolated hamlet fell away behind me. At every other turn a new vista opened onto glistening peaks. Stacks of winter firewood insulated the walls of the last, remote farmhouses. A single, lone dog trotted along the broken tarmac. Otherwise the place felt empty of life.
Zakarpattia, the west-facing nose of Ukraine, borders four countries: Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Romania. In its hills, frontiers moved more often than people. A man named András Orosz had lived in the village of Novoye Selo, called Tiszaújhely in Hungarian. Over the course of his long life he had held five different nationalities: Austro-Hungarian, Romanian, Czechoslovak, Soviet and, finally, Ukrainian. Yet Orosz had never once left his village; the borders had been moved around him.
‘Do you know the old joke about the baby who was born on the border?’ asked a forester in German, the first living soul I’d seen in an hour and who I asked for directions. ‘To find his true nationality his father picked him up and threw him in the air. If the baby landed on the Hungarian side of the border, he was Hungarian. If he landed on the Ukrainian side, he was Ukrainian. But if he landed on his head, he’d be Russian.’
On the snowy verge he drew a route map for me, over the pass to Bilky and Brid, uphill to Zahattya and Zavydovo. He too had heard about the golden church, although he had never seen it.
‘But I know for certain it’s here,’ he insisted, stabbing at a point in the snow, laughing along with me. ‘I have heard the story.’
I drove on, climbing even higher into the mountains, deeper into muffle-headed blurriness. The pharmacist’s tonic may not have advertised its hallucinogenic qualities but the Skoda did develop a remarkable facility to sail over the potholes. I opened the window to gulp deep breaths of thin air, in the hope of clearing my head, but it only exacerbated the cough. I tried to focus on describing the scene around me – a peak enveloped in cloud, a curved ridge thigh-deep in snow, a dark abyss – but almost drove into the ditch while writing notes. I paused to align my road map with distant peaks and a frozen river, then carried on, the Skoda’s tyres spinning on ice patches.
Gold had been mined around Beregovo since the twelfth century. In the Soviet years more than twenty miles of tunnels were dug into its ore-rich volcanic dome. On one of my orientation stops I spotted a mine-head of Avellana Gold, the Cyprus-based company that has sunk thousands of drill holes, hoping to revitalise the empty wilderness as a Carpathian Klondike.
An hour later the setting sun gilded an edge of mountain, casting a band of yellow across crag and scar. I realised that the nearest village lay miles behind me and I began to doubt that I could find my way back to it, despite my good sense of direction. Half a dozen switchback turns on labyrinthine forest tracks finally convinced me that I was lost. Ice crystals glistened in the snowfields, filling the air with a kind of magic, wrapping a halo around an old wooden building.