Boyko

Boyko is not a trade and not a father's name. The Boykos are an ethnolinguistic group of the Carpathian Mountains living across Ukraine, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland, and many prefer to be called what they are, verkhovyntsi, highlanders. With the Lemkos to the west and the Hutsuls to the east and south-east they make up the Rusyns; they speak a distinct East Slavic dialect and are counted within Ukraine as a sub-group of Ukrainians. The surname is what outsiders called a man for the people he came from.

The word has been argued over since the 19th century. The priest Joseph Levytsky, in his Hramatyka of 1831, took it from the exclamation boi, boiie, it is really so, which the population used constantly, and that remains the general view; Pavel Jozef Safarik's attempt to tie the Boykos to the Boiki of the 10th-century De Administrando Imperio was dismissed by Mykhailo Hrushevsky before the century was out. The people are held to descend from the White Croats of the region, or from Vlach shepherds out of Transylvania.

Boikivshchyna, the Boyko region, runs along the central and western Carpathians of Ukraine: southern Lviv Oblast, in the Stryi, Drohobych and Sambir raions, the western edge of Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast around Kalush, and the north-eastern corner of Zakarpattia, carrying on into north-east Slovakia and the south-easternmost part of Poland. Up to 400,000 people lived in it, most of them Boykos.

A traveller could tell which people he was among off the roofline of the village church. Most Boykos are Ukrainian Greek Catholic, with a minority Orthodox, and their wooden churches carry three domes in one line, the middle one slightly the largest. The Lemko builders next door used three cupolas too, but put the highest at the entrance and let the roof fall away towards the sanctuary. The same timber, the same faith, and a silhouette that said whose valley you had walked into.

One of the things collected in the Boyko country was how the villages handled a birth nobody would name openly. Mykhailo Zubrytskyi recorded that in Boyko lands a child born out of wedlock was baptised under a rare name kept for the purpose: Yov, which is Job, or Mokriy, which is Mocius. The name was the record, and anyone who heard it read out in the parish knew what it meant.

Zenon Kuzelia, drawing on Oskar Kolberg's collections and his own, found the practice district by district with a different vocabulary in each: around Stryi the names were Havrylo and Danylo, near Sambir a girl so marked was Khrystyna or Pelaha, over in Pokutia, Fteopump, Onysyfor and Amfylokh. Stryi and Sambir are Boyko raions, so the custom can be followed valley by valley. Families pushed back, calling the child something else at home and petitioning to have the register altered. It ended under Soviet rule, when parents were given the right to name their own children.

The Boykos lost their country in the middle of the 20th century, and the Lemkos next door lost theirs more completely. Under the Polish-Soviet agreement of 1945 most Lemko families left for Soviet Ukraine, and the rest were caught by Operation Vistula in 1947, a state-ordered removal of civilians meant to strip the Ukrainian insurgency in south-eastern Poland of any population to shelter in.

The Boykos went the same way, out of Sanok, Lesko and Przemysl in the population exchange and the relocations of 1947, and out of Czarna in Bieszczady County after the territorial exchange of 1951. Lemkos won the right to return in 1956 and about 5,000 families took it; most of both peoples never went back. An estimated 230,000 people of Boyko origin were alive in 1970, but the identity did not survive the scattering as something anyone would write on a form: 131 people gave Boyko as separate from Ukrainian in the census of 2001. In 2016 the Verkhovna Rada renamed Telmanove Raion as Boykivske Raion, in commemoration.

The valleys produced a great deal more than shepherds. Yuriy Drohobych (1450-1494) was the first doctor of medicine in Ukraine, rector of the University of Bologna in 1481 and 1482 and a professor at the Jagiellonian University in 1488. Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny (1582-1622) came out of the same country to lead the Zaporozhian Cossacks as hetman from 1616 to 1622.

Ivan Franko (1856-1916), poet, writer and political activist, is the largest name the region has given Ukraine, and the university in Lviv carries it; the writer Halyna Pahutiak, born in 1958, is of the same country. A mountain district with its own dialect, its own dress and its own churches kept sending its sons and daughters down out of the passes to Bologna, to the Sich and to Lviv.

Ivan Nikiforovich Boyko was born on 24 October 1910 into a Ukrainian peasant family at Zhornyshche, in the Podolian Governorate. He finished primary school, went out to work, and in September 1930 volunteered for the Red Army. The Ulyanovsk Armored School made him a tank officer in 1939, and he was in his first fighting that year at Khalkhin-Gol. He opened the war as deputy commander of a reconnaissance battalion in July 1941 and served under Mikhail Katukov.

On 28 December 1943 his regiment, by then the 69th Guards, was ordered on to Koziatyn and marched thirty-five kilometres to reach it; the Germans, the stronger force, broke at the speed of the advance, and Boyko held the town through a two-day counterattack. He was a Hero of the Soviet Union by 10 January 1944, and within the month had the 64th Guards Tank Brigade, which he took across the Dniester and the Prut into Chernivtsi, so far ahead of support that it fought alone until the corps came up. The second award followed on 26 April 1944, and he finished the war at Berlin.

Volodymyr Semenovych Boyko was born in Mariupol on 20 August 1938 and raised in Sadki. He wanted the sea, and got into the maritime school and the Soviet Navy in 1953; what he came back to was steel. From 1955 he worked in the water supply shop of the Zhdanov Metallurgical Plant, later the Illich Steel and Iron Works, was supervising the rolling business by 1971, and became general director in 1990.

It was the worst year anyone could have taken it on. The country and its economy came apart together, plants shut one after another and wages went unpaid across Ukraine, and Boyko kept the Illich works running and Mariupol in work. What he turned the plant's money into is still legible in the city: schools, clinics, parks, roads, the airport, the Illichivets Stadium rebuilt for UEFA Cup football. He was made a Hero of Ukraine in 2003, the only holder of that title from the city, and the stadium carries his name now.

Edgar Paul Boyko was a student at the University of Vienna when Germany annexed Austria in 1938. He left for Scotland, took a chemistry degree at St Andrews and emigrated to the United States in 1939; Alaska got him in 1952, and he practised there on the principle that a trial was a performance for the jury. As the state's Attorney General from 1967 to 1968 he helped form the Governor's Task Force on Native Land Claims, the road to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971.

Boyko is one of the commonest surnames in Ukraine, and it went with the emigration into Canada, the United States and beyond. Eugene Boyko (1923-2003) shot Canada's centennial film Helicopter Canada for the National Film Board and was nominated for an Academy Award; Georgi Boyko (1933-2002) was a Lviv petroleum geologist; Aleksandra Boiko (1918-1996) commanded a tank in Soviet service. They share no ancestor. What they share is the name of a whole mountain people, most of whom no longer live in the mountains.