"They are a people without a country."

If you want to read a book on this topic I recommend Glory To Jesus Christ - A History of the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese by Fr. Lawrence Barriger.

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(RISU) - Sons and daughters of peasant farmers who found their way to Johnstown in the late 1800s from isolated Carpathian Mountain villages in central Europe did not have a strong sense of national identity and had little knowledge or interest in politics of their homeland.

"They didn't know who the hell they were," history professor Michael Kopanic of Cresson said.

"They were too busy trying to make a living. They didn't have a national awakening until they came here."

The people now generally identified as Carpatho-Rusyns have been given many names over the centuries: Rusnak, Uhro Rusyn, Ruthenian, Carpatho-Ukrainian, Lemko, Slavish and Byzantine.

Except for a brief period after World War II, there has never been an independent nation for the Carpatho-Rusyn people.

"They are a people without a country," said Richard Burkert, Johnstown Area Heritage Association president and chief executive officer.

"Even today with the resurgence of interest in our heritage, it is still kind of like an invisible nationality."

Little Russia

The homeland once known as Little Russia was actually a scattered region of isolated mountain villages in what are now Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine and Romania.

Its people were set apart as a distinct ethnic group with its own language and religion.

They knew little of the outside world and referred to themselves as the "po-nasomu" people.

It translates as "people like us" -- not Ukrainians, not Slovaks, not Polish; just us.

Rusyns were always simple mountain people, Kopanic said, eking out their livings as farmers on land they rented from absentee farmers.

"You won't find Carpatho-Rusyn nobles," Kopanic said.

Carpathian Mountain passes were key travel routes from eastern to western Europe, making the region an attractive holding for ambitious governments, said the Very. Rev. George Johnson, rector of St. John the Baptist Orthodox Church, 427 First St., East Conemaugh Borough.

"It is not a big region," Johnson said.

'Strategic region'

"It was always considered a strategic region because of the passes through the mountains," Johnson said. "It was desirable for empire countries to be able to control it."

With each new empire came a new identity.

Those arriving in Johnstown before World War I were officially citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, although they were neither Austrian nor Hungarian, Burkert said.

Their language was similar to the Slovaks who came before, so many found their way to Slovak neighborhoods and churches.

The identity crisis has continued to this day, so much so that many Americans of Carpatho-Rusyn descent cannot identify their ethnic roots.

"I think what's interesting about doing this nationality or group is that, even in Johnstown -- that if anywhere is the (American) homeland of the Carpatho-Rusyns -- most of the people who read your article aren't going to know what you are talking about," Burkert said.

No homeland

"They never had their own homeland," said Kopanic, who has published works on Slovakian history and teaches at St. Francis University in Loretto and the University of Maryland, University College, in suburban Washington.

"The Carpatho-Rusyns are a lot more complicated than the Slavs," Kopanic said, noting that many Rusyn communities are physically located in Slovakia.

Complications spread when as many as 500,000 Rusyns came to America to escape poverty following the depression of the 1870s.

Many Rusyn immigrants found their way to southwestern Pennsylvania, finding jobs in the steel mills and coal mines around Johnstown and Pittsburgh.

"There weren't more than a couple million of them (in Europe)," Burkert said.

"That's a huge migration of people. Whole regions were transplanted."

Official language

This was also the time when Hungary's leaders outlawed the Carpatho-Rusyn language and closed schools where the dialect was used. Hungarian, or Magyar, was the official language.

Prior to World War II, the closest thing to an independent Carpatho-Rusyn nation was the Czechoslovakia province of Subcarpathian Rus', which was established after the First World War during a remapping of Europe.

Ironically, its formation and alignment with Czechoslovakia was launched by Rusyn organizations meeting in suburban Pittsburgh, calling themselves the Greek Catholic Union and United Societies in July 1918, Kopanic said.

The group sent attorney Gregory I. Zatkovich to Europe, where he gained support for a self-governed Rusyn province within Czechoslovakia.

First governor

Although he was born in the region, Zatkovich was raised in the United States and was a U.S. citizen. That did not prevent Czechoslovakia's founding president, Tomas Masaryk, from naming Zatkovich first governor of Subcarpathian Rus' in 1920, promising the Rusyn homeland the autonomy that never existed.

"They thought they would get independence in Czechoslovakia," Kopanic said.

"But (Masaryk) wanted to form a centralized state. He gave in to opportunists."

Zatkovich resigned and came back to Pittsburgh in 1921 following the evaporation of hope for an independent Rusyn state.

A second reconfiguration of national boundaries following World War II at first created a Carpatho-Rusyn nation, but as soon as the Soviet Union began its eastern European push for communism, Joseph Stalin declared the Rusyns did not exist, said John Righetti, president of the Pittsburgh-based Carpatho-Rusyn Society.

"They did not exist as a people," Righetti said.

'All Ukrainian'

"They all were Ukrainian in the United Ukraine," he said. "They all had to be Ukrainians. From there, he very effectively spread communism through Eastern Europe."

Communist governments continued the historic mistreatment of Carpatho-Rusyns, breaking up communities, said Monsignor Raymond Balta of Rusyn-founded St. Mary Byzantine Greek Catholic Church in the Cambria City section of Johnstown.

"Part of what they did in that regime was to move people around," Balta said.

"You transplant people from this country to this country. You diluted the concentration. It was much more difficult."

Resilient Rusyns

But the resilient Rusyns were able to overcome the Russian Communists, continuing their traditions in private, Righetti said.

"Rusyn culture, theater, all of this culture bubbled from the underground," Righetti said.

The fall of communism and heightened ethnic awareness in the United States has reopened lines of communication between local residents and their ancestral homeland and family members there.

"I just discovered in 2000 we still had relatives there," Michael Charnego of Homer City said.

The Windber native has made several trips to explore his family's "roots" in the Carpathian Mountain villages of Runina and Parihuzovoce, both in the Humenne district of Slovakia.

"Seeing the villages, I could understand my grandfather a lot better and their way of thinking," Charnego said, noting the Carpathians' similarity to western Pennsylvania.

Villagers' homes had the same type of gardens, grape arbors and other features of his family's homes around Johnstown.

"That's what you see today in those small villages," Charnego said.

"They brought their culture with them."