text: Alina Skrzypczak,      tr. Olena Zagórska,     fot. Ireneusz Skrzypczak

Zbarazh - once more about the Polish cemetery

The lovely sunny July 2006 encouraged to bathe and walk through the forest. As for us, the week spent in Zbarazh, Ukraine, brought other impressions and tasks to us. That time our trip was a bit private. Beside my husband and me, Marcin Grochowina the teacher from the School Complex No2 in Łańcut and Maksymilian Bartnik the graduate of this school participated in it. Each of us determined the precise aim. My husband and I had to do the  inventory work in the cemetery while  Marcin and Maksymilian were adjusting the mechanism of an electronic church bell installed three weeks earlier during our previous visit with military class students.

The week spent in Zbarazh passed very quickly. Every morning we went to the cemetery with our necessary eqiupment such as cameras, tripods, writing kits, spatulas, brushes and gloves and wrote down the gravestone inscriptions till the afternoon taking photographs of each tombstone. In order not to miss any of them, we divided the cemetery into squares. As for the inscription-reading, time seems to have lasted differently-quickly or very slowly. It depended on conditions of the gravestones. Some were simply to copy out and and some even to palpate because of their high dilapidation level. Especially some mossy tombstones had to be brushed very delicately. The gravestone inscriptions, which brought us the most joy, were literally wrested from the earth because of their upside-down and obverse positions. Thanks to Marcin and Maksymilian who helped us lift the gravestones in the afternoons, some inscriptions became legible. There are still a lot of such tombs. There is  a lot of work that still needs to be done in order to extricate new inscriptions. To complete our work Marcin and Maksymilian sprayed pesticides in some wayside areas of the cemetery. Those days of intensive work  bore fruits of about 500 gravestone inscriptions. To do more we had no energy. After we returned home, we started compiling collected data. We had to set the standard of the register, segregate everything properly and of course store all data in the computer. It took us  several weeks to complete. Finally, we created the database of about 600 surnames of buried people. Everyone can use it any time. We use it too, informing interested people who request the  information and send  letters and e-mails to us. The following trip is planned for the summer 2007. We hope we will succeed in compiling the whole material of the necropolis. We are also going to publish the effects of our work. The problem is to prepare the topographic plan of the cemetery. It is not enough to use sketchmaps drawn by the students and me only. These sketches are not  precise. Therefore, we need professional measurement. So we are trying to solve this problem. We also hope that we will preserve the material  which can be written down these days but it is also a possibility to lose it forever in the near future. Thus, not only have we been registering the past but also the present.

One can analyze the collected data right now:

140 inscriptions do not have any date, or it is entirely impossible to decipher the date of burial.

100 inscriptions written down during the first trip are not included in above-mentioned statistics.

Exemplary extracts from the register of the gravestone inscriptions in the Zbarazh cemetery July 2006