South of the Dukla pass, October 2019

One of the not-so-clearly-defined aims of our stay in the Ropki valley in the Beskid Niski in Poland was to reach a cluster of old wooden orthodox churches south of the Dukla pass, the lowest one in the main range of the Carpathian mountains, situated in Slovakia, actually.

The folksy Lemko churches of this part of Carpathians are — in my opinion — an eclectic mixture of the eastern church tradition, local craft and folklore, and popular trends of the western culture. While the oldest church icons are fine, the later ones, starting from the 18th century, are kitschy, ironically called bohomazy, divine scribblings… The same can be said of the architecture, while the oldest or the purely folksy examples remains fine, the newer productions remind of a standard church fare of the towns south or north of the Carpathian mountains, an unfortunate imitation of the stone architecture.

It is worthwhile to mention, that two of these old wooden Lemko churches, in Ladomirová and in Bodružal are on the noble UNESCO list, as is the one in Kwiatoń, Poland, situated just nearby the place we stayed in October of 2019: Ropki in the western part of the Beskid Niski, in the probably least mountaineous part of the long Carpathian main ridge. The lowest pass of the Carpathian watershed between the Baltic sea and the Danube (and the Black Sea) is the said Dukla Pass, only 500m above the sea level.

We have had a mixed luck while finding out how to get inside an usually closed remote village churches. Finding out and then persuading a church key keeper to leave her or his daily routine and spend some time to get there and open the church for just another tourist was not easy, but sometimes very rewarding.

In order to warm up, we start with a few landscape pictures from the area we stayed, and then turn to the fine architecture of the Kwiatoń church, photographed at the sunset time. Then we move to Slovakia, much further southeast, in order to visit the fine wooden churches of Dobroslava (1705), Ladomirová (1742), Šemetkovce (1752-3), Bodružal (1658), Miroľa (1770), Prikra (1777) and Hunkovce (end of 18th century) in eastern Slovakia. We finish with a final visit in Kwiatoń (build well before 1700) again, this time with a few pictures from the somehow pretentious interior. We give up precise captioning of the pictures, just limiting ourselves to the church site and its dedication.

Gallery (123 images)