Tucked into the folds of verdant, rolling mountains, the village of Vlkolínec (or “Wolf Village”) has been preserved by its remoteness. A pristine sylvan frame lines its grassy grazing fields, which for centuries supported the villager’s provincial lifestyle. The imperfect lines of the cottage walls suggest a rugged and simple past, yet the happy, heedless splash of clashing colors on every facade speaks to the reality. Life was labor in old Slovak villages, but that hardship taught joviality and an appreciation for the rewards of struggle. I could almost see, walking through the still-inhabited streets, the many harvest festivals which must’ve brought the people of Vlkolínec together after a laborious Summer and before a long, harsh Winter.
My host grandparents have enthusiastically sought to show me the wonders of Slovakia, most of which they themselves haven’t seen in many years. Havránok—detailed in the previous post—Vlkolínec, and the largest wooden church in Slovakia were all part of a trip we took through the Liptov region a couple weeks ago. My Grandmother commented with amazement just how little this village had changed in the decades since she had last visited. I learned recently that some 70 years ago, when my host grandmother was born, her family lived in a village that didn’t look terribly unlike Vlkolínec. She and her siblings did not wear traditional folk costumes or work without modern equipment, but their parents had. It occurred to me just how vast our relative perceptions of time were. For me, Vlkolínec was a distant representation of life ages ago, something far remote from comparatively advanced 20th century USA… But for her it was something very near. The way her parents and grandparents had lived.
I had become rather tired of the barren trees which littered the Tatra landscape since October and I tried my best to keep them out of my photos while in Vlkolínec. I discovered this was impossible with the way I was trying to frame the village–capturing entire houses and the surrounding mountains. I faced the dilemma of wanting to depict the soul of the village, without capturing it’s entirety… A minutiae of the village’s appearance caught my attention and proved the solution. Each window set amount the colorful walls of Vlkolínec was unique. Either the color or the pattern around its frame, or perhaps maybe there were some trinkets of village life behind the panes. I began to capture nearly every window I passed, promising to do justice to the whole village on a greener day, but amazed at how well village life could be felt simply by looking into a window.
Signed, Andrew