The language people speak, the stories they tell, and the traditions they carry forward.
LEMKO.org preserves language material, poetry, literature, customs, dress, photographs and community documentation. These collections show that Lemko heritage is not only a subject of history; it continues through speech, writing, music, family memory and public gatherings.
Enter the existing language resources, texts and linguistic material.
Explore poetry, writing and literary works preserved in the collection.
Traditional art, customs and material culture from across the archive.
Photographic records of clothing, ornament and cultural presentation.
See culture practiced publicly across generations and communities.
Continue to contemporary music, performances and audiovisual cultural material.
Your recent festival photographs show clothing and ornament being worn by real people at contemporary gatherings. Placing those images beside historical material makes the continuity visible.
The same principle applies to language: the archive should preserve old texts while also pointing toward people who continue to speak, sing and create today.
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This modern colorized version was made from an original black-and-white photograph only about the size of a business card.
The identification was preserved from information on the reverse of the original. The photograph shows the Bielanka choir performing during the Easter holidays in Rozdziele in the 1960s.
Archive note: colorized derivative. The original black-and-white photograph remains the archival source and should be preserved separately, together with an image of its reverse-side identification.
One important example is the traditional Lemko sound represented by Cyrillic Ы / ы. For many speakers it is a characteristic sound of Lemko and neighboring Carpathian Rusyn speech. Younger descendants may replace it with a sound influenced by the languages around them.
I was. The word был contains ы.
I hit / I was hitting. The change of vowel distinguishes the word from был.
Speakers often illustrate the contrast with the humorous idea: “I was there, but I didn't hit anybody.”
The remastered Language section should eventually pair examples like these with recordings of native speakers from different generations, so visitors can hear the distinction rather than relying on approximate comparisons with Polish, Ukrainian or Russian sounds.