Epifan Drovniak / Nikifor Krynicki

Krynica village, not the resort town

The Lemko community discussed here lived in Krynica village, the suburban village adjoining the better-known spa and town of Krynica. The commercial activity was concentrated in the town, while some Lemko families in Krynica village earned additional income by renting rooms and providing meals and lodging to Polish visitors. This gave some village families opportunities not available in more isolated agricultural communities.

Epifan Drovniak's own circumstances should not be confused with that relative prosperity. His later fame as an artist belongs to a later chapter of his life; these photographs preserve him first as a person within the Krynica village community.

How these photographs survived

These photographs came from surviving Lemko widows in the Monastyryska area after 2007. Their families had been displaced from Krynica to Soviet Ukraine in 1945–46. Some displaced families later moved westward within Soviet Ukraine after attempts to return home proved impossible; others remained farther east when another move was impractical.

By the time Walter Maksimovich met the surviving widows, the men of their generation were gone. The women preserved photographs from the old Krynica community and supplied identifications from family and community memory. Many of these women died during the following decade.

During these field-documentation years, Maksimovich traveled with a backpack containing a camera, video equipment, scanner and laptop. His mother-in-law lived in Monastyryska, providing a local base from which family photographs and oral identifications could be documented where the owners lived. The digital copies and recorded names now preserve information that might otherwise have disappeared with the last witnesses.