Visit to the Ukrainian Festival

Friday afternoon, my youngest daughter's mother in law Ann came to visit for the weekend. She and I have become "family" for sure and this was her second visit this year. Strangely enough, although our children met each other in Wash DC, Ann was originally from Irondequoit although her family was Ukrainian. She had very much wanted to come to the Rochester Ukrainian Festival to see if she could run into some old friends. She last lived in this area 35 years ago but moved back to the Albany area late last year.


Saturday, we headed off to the Ukrainian Festival which is held each year at St. Josephat's in Irondequoit (that is the big mosque like looking church on Ridge Road). We went around to all the vendors and surveyed the food for later. I bought a book on making pysanky eggs as with my dyeing I have always wanted to do this and this was a wonderful book!!

The high point of the afternoon was almost 2 hours of folk dancing by several troupes of dancers, both locally and from a huge Ukrainian community in Toronto (Ann has relatives up there as well). The music and dancing and costumes were absolutely spell binding and we are now planning to go back this afternoon to see more as they are supposed to do different dances this afternoon.


The dance with the baskets symbolized the traditions of bread (Ukraine is the breadbasket of former Soviet Republic), the pysanky eggs and then fruitfulness.

We grabbed a dinner of Ukranian food to bring home and were treated to pierrogi and kielbasa and sauer kraut as well as stuffed cabbage. It was excellent!! The names are all different in Ukrainian though. The most amazing part for Ann was watching the dancers and realizing where her oldest son (my son in law) got his coloring. They all looked like him!! He definitely has the Ukranian genes. The Ukrainians from her generation were generally dark and from the part of the Ukraine that bordered Poland whereas the new influx from Ukrainia are from the Russian sector and are very blonde. It was quite the cultural experience.

Ann shared her memories of coming to Rochester from a displaced person camp in Germany near Stuttgart where she was born and spent the first several years of her life. Her uncle sponsored her family coming to the United States after the war and she first lived in Shortsville before making Irondequoit her home.