Autumn is here, and the last and first time I visited the place was early spring this year. The blue domes hovered above the weather barrier of juniper and cottonwood around the church. I hit the brakes and looked up in wonder.
This is on the high plains of Colorado, five and a half miles north of Calhan, not, you would guess, a Russian Orthodox heartland.
Upon my return from that day trip, I discovered that St. Mary’s Dormition Orthodox Church was the community centre for those come from the Austro-Hungarian homelands to claim land and work the steel mills in Pueblo, Colorado, in the late 1800’s. These were miners and hot mill workers, but raised as farmers at their roots. Their exodus here was economic, to escape the gloom of Central Europe and the foul imperial politics and storm of World War I. This church holds a Slavic Fest annually to celebrate its heritage, and I checked religiously throughout the summer for this year’s dates to be published. Yesterday and today, today, Sunday, for me. A fifth generation of immigrant families could be in attendance.
Denise does not question my urge to drive an hour and a half each way to eat in a church, sitting at a table with strangers; she knows how deeply I crave peasant food as memory.
The craving is ancestral, jump-started when I began doing business in Central Europe many years ago. Home base then was Vienna and I felt comfortable in the middle of Europe, and yes partly due to the art and architecture, music, the history of empires, boundaries in constant flux, the long road from there to here, but also because of the familiar feeling of the countryside and traditions in the villages – the customs of hunting (though I do not hunt), local celebrations, church rituals, superstitions, and somehow, inbred social memories of people who looked familiar to me. The cafés and restaurants of Central Europe reassured me.
My Grandmother Warzel, Susan, Zuzana, Baba, spoke no English, only Russian, having immigrated sometime around 1900, married, and moved into a home in the small Russian Orthodox enclave on the east side of Buffalo, New York. We are not sure from where she came, though it was most likely from what is now Slovakia. Her husband, Josef, presumably was from the same place. He had passed away before I was born—a railroad worker, by my father’s account. There are no photographs of my grandfather. Perhaps he did not exist.
I wonder at her feelings about the house she moved into on Benzinger Street, coming from one likely much more rudimentary in amenities and size. It must have felt massive, at times overwhelming for a peasant. At the end of the street, addressed actually on Ideal Street, a proper name for the location, is Saints Peter and Paul Orthodox Church, the anchor of this “village” within an American city. On nearby Lovejoy Street was Warzel’s Tavern, another anchor in the “village,” operated by an offshoot of the family that I really did not know. A craft brewery now on Lovejoy styles its “The Olde Cheeseburger” as modelled after the “Warzel Burger,” served at our namesake’s tavern from 1923 to 1998.
She, Baba, was small, always smiling, hands gnarled, knuckles swollen, grey hair in a bun, kind and loving and a princess of a peasant. One memory is of her and me in the attic of the worn, two-story house, where light came in from the windowed eaves, front and back, and she handmade very thin noodles on a large wooden table. I watched in anticipation because there was nothing as good as her noodles in chicken broth, nothing. We did not speak intelligibly, although she spoke, telling me what she was doing at each step, with me not able to translate, but following. We understood each other. She would pinch my cheek, smiling and say “Schnudik” (shnudik, shnudic, snudick, schnoodik,?), perhaps a local variation of schnook but with a wicked edge, not pity), which my aunt Anna, her daughter, told me years later translated to “piss pot.”
Baba would be at home here in this hall of food and farmer and iron and steel bloodlines. Lowly Bohunks to the landed Lutherans already in place in Calhan. She would converse and feed them, all, if she only could.
The church is open, and we step in to see the dazzling icons, but shortly make way to the hall and tent across the Calhan Highway. A table is set up, and two women are in charge of food tickets, with a young boy manning the cash box. He is wearing a beautiful tobacco-hued western hat that is clearly custom-made, with a roper crown, not a kid’s replica from Boot Barn. He hands me ten bucks change, and I compliment him on his nice hat. He smiles, a bit embarrassed, so I say again: “Really nice hat.” He says thanks, and we enter the tent where tables are set up, and local folks are eating, all known to each other and chatting it up. Through one door into the hall is the bar, dark, Slovak brandies lined up, a tap with Czechvar beer, and a vodka bottle on the back bar. Through the second door is the hall set with rows of tables, a food line where volunteers serve from warming trays, and a music combo set up at the north end, the players leaving the chairs and instruments empty while they visit the bar.
The noise is friendly, loud but not raucous, neighbours catching up and eating traditional food made by the elders of the community, who started on the feast six weeks ago. The number of pirogis that have been dished out over two days is an extraordinary number; the stuffed cabbages are packed dense with meat. I eat sauerkraut with kolbasa cooked in, a hunk of the sausage on the side. Denise, even with her doubts about my intent on being here, is smiling, so I offer to buy her a Slovak brandy in the bar.
We get a crash course from the volunteer tending to the variations of these unknown bottles, and she chooses a 90-proof Koltiska liqueur because it is less sweet than their 60-proof product. The Koltiska family arrived in Sheridan, Wyoming, about the same time the homesteaders were breaking ground in Calhan, so the liqueur and vodka are a cultural pipeline between two states, but rooted in another country. I take a taste, and it’s very good—warming, not burning, a good chaser to the food we just devoured under the tent.
The duo goes back to their stools and music stands and begin to play country and western music, and I hear the best version of “Amarillo by Morning” I believe I have ever experienced – violin and accordion, a mellow, aged, country voice, and the two players are wearing lederhosen and Austrian hunting hats. This is the Alan Polivka Band in its two-man configuration, Alan the accordionist. Somehow it works, though the visual is unsettling, and Denise and I are into the comfortable rhythm of the place, the hum of community. Several volunteers come out and move the first tables in the row nearest the band to make space for dancing, and two women immediately start strutting in tandem in a dance movement I have never seen before. It is oddly hypnotic and seems to be just a simple syncopated walk and glide, turn around and repeat.
I re-enter the bar to purchase one more glass of the Koltiska for my wife and tell Steven that this gathering is really something special. He smiles and says, “But maybe not for long. Everyone who works on the food preparation is in their eighties, and volunteers are hard to come by as the younger ones are just not interested anymore.” His son belongs to the fifth generation here since settlement by the Slavic community. Helping behind the bar, his son asks if I also want a Koltiska and I tell him no, I am driving. He lights up with a smile and says “So am I.” “But I am driving to Denver.” “I am driving in the same direction.” “But not as far.” “No, only a mile, but in the same direction.”
I am uncertain whether this sense of humour is Slavic or high plains in derivation. Droll, subtle, sly. An empty landscape breeds an ability to jab and snicker and enjoy human interaction. Father George, the rector of St. Mary’s Dormition Orthodox Church, is a young, handsome priest with a Central European accent and that same sense of twinkling, subdued wit. During a tour of the old church, up the hill from the blue domes, he goes off on a tangent describing his dislike of cremation versus the sound tradition of putting a body in the ground. He ticks off the requirements for burial in the adjacent St. Mary Cemetery: Russian Orthodox, member of the church, no cremations. I am not certain if he is serious about that last point.
Steven’s words about “not for long” ring true further south of here, over the border in northern New Mexico, where I have spent much of my life in the past forty years. The mountain towns there, each with its adobe church, are similarly community and family-centred, food being the connection for all. The villages are also in the liminal twilight of losing their aged population and so dissolving the communal bond that held families together and kept the churches in repair. Their children and grandchildren have no interest in keeping the traditions alive or working on re-mudding the adobe structures that have centred their towns for two, some nearing three, hundred years. The structures decay to disrepair, the towns wallow in sadness and drugs, and a culture begins to dissipate in the blue mountain air.
It is the sad rhythm of rural America.
Yet the people of the St. Mary’s Dormition Orthodox Church are alive and communing this day, serving the food they grew up with to strangers like me. Baba would be proud of them, and of her blue-eyed boy for diving into the wedding beef without blinking, savouring every nuance of it on the high plains of as winter approaches on its eternal schedule. I count my time since Baba and find my grandchildren are fifth-generation immigrants also.
You can see the heavy autumn clouds over the Front Range from the steps of St. Mary’s Dormition Church, her blue domes above and behind you, and can feel the world turning, for better or worse. These celebrations are a simple avowal of belonging to place, community through food, not the quest for answers to everything. Here is the soundness of the ordinary in the vast quiet of the high plains.
