It is spelled Kief but it is as if it were Kiev. And it is not the capital of Ukraine raped by Russian troops. It is a village, almost a ghost village, lost in the great prairies of North Dakota, one of the most remote areas in the United States. And even in this village there are probably people who are anxious for the fate of their great-great-grandparents’ country, for the fate of Ukraine.
Yes, because it was Ukrainian refugees of Protestant religion who fled central Ukraine in the second half of the nineteenth century to baptize Kief this handful of poorly maintained houses and dirt roads.
Theirs is a typical story of the formation of the United States and of the migratory chains that populated them. Hundreds of thousands left the plains of Ukraine after 1870 and arrived here after crossing Europe and Canada or the eastern states of the USA. To attract them, the Homestead Act of 1867 which established a dowry of 160 acres per family with which to support themselves and of which the first 40 had to be strictly cultivated within the first year of stay.
Dancer during the Ukrainian Festival
It is difficult even to imagine the sufferings and deprivations of those immigrants, difficult also for their descendants who today enjoy a life that is undoubtedly more comfortable, even in the almost hallucinating spaces of this flat state, with infinite horizons and rarefied inhabited centers, thanks also to the mineral rights linked to oil extraction.
Today, if Kief – almost in the exact center of North Dakota – looks bleak around the old wooden church and has seen its inhabitants drop from 300 to less than a dozen, the liveliest and most vibrant Ukrainian communities are scattered a bit. everywhere in the state.
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of St. John in Pembina is registered in the National Register of Historic Places, in Dickinson there is a Ukrainian Cultural Institute and every year in July, the North Dakota Ukrainian Festival celebrates the culture and history of Ukrainians in these grasslands. History which is also documented in the book “Ukrainians in North Dakota: in their voices” which in turn is based on a collection of stories and testimonies fixed in audio contributions preserved in the State Historical Society of the ND.
Traditional decorated eggs for Easter
Who knows with how much sadness and apprehension the heirs of those immigrants, in the heart of the Great American Prairies, side by side with the proud ancestors of the Sioux natives, will decorate the traditional Easter eggs in a few weeks while the Ukraine of their ancestors faces one of the most terrible of its troubled history.