Lemko Hall may be best known as the location of the wedding reception in the 1978 film "The Deer Hunter." The facility’s rich non-Hollywood history is less well known. In fact, few people know the meaning of the word Lemko, which refers to a Slavic ethnic group whose people came from a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that is now southeastern Poland.
Lemkos began immigrating to Cleveland in the late 19th-century (around the same time as other Central and Eastern Europeans) and settled in Tremont in large numbers. Immigrant Andrew Koreny constructed "Koreny Hall" in 1911, and it became a social center with a saloon and a ballroom for special events and performances. For a time, a savings and loan serving Rusyn immigrants also was located in the building.
Cleveland's Lemko population continued to grow and, by the early 1930s, it was the largest of any city in the nation. Until it moved to Yonkers, New York, in 1939 the Lemko Association of the USA and Canada (founded in Cleveland in 1931) had its headquarters in Cleveland and published its newspaper in the city.
In the 1930s, the local branch of the Lemko Association purchased Koreny Hall and renamed it Lemko Hall. For almost six decades, the building continued to serve as a community and cultural center for Lemkos, hosting theatrical performances, concerts, lectures, weddings, language classes, and several of the Lemko Association's national congresses. Neighborhood residents continued to frequent its bar, as well. The Lemko Association sold the building to a developer in 1987. It now contains a mix of condominiums and ground-floor commercial spaces.
]]>The plot of land that makes up the Rusin Cultural Garden is located along East Boulevard. It was dedicated in June, 1939.
Most Rusyns (also commonly spelled Rusins) immigrated to Cleveland in the period from 1880 to World War I. The Rusyns are an Eastern Slavic ethnic group who speak a dialect known as Rusyn or Lemko. Rusyns descend from Ruthenians but, unlike some of the groups related to them, did not adopt the term Ukrainian in the early twentieth century to describe their ethnicity. Cleveland's Rusyns trace their heritage to the Carpathian Mountains, which is the second longest (932 mi) mountain range in Europe. This chain of mountains stretches in an arc from the Czech Republic (3%) in the northwest across Slovakia (17%), through Hungary (4%) and Poland (10%) to the Ukraine (11%). It then runs south to Romania (53%) before arcing back east to the Iron Gates (gorge) on the Danube River between Romania and Serbia (2%).
One of the earliest (1890) Rusyn settlements in Cleveland was located within a Hungarian community along Orange and Woodland Avenues. As these groups grew they both moved eastward along the Union and Buckeye Avenues. A second Rusyn settlement also developed in Tremont and by 1906 Rusyns were settling as far west as Lakewood. By the 1930s, more than 30,000 Rusyns lived in the city. After World War II, however, Rusyns, like many others, moved to the suburbs in large numbers. In 1983, approximately 25,000 Rusyns still lived in the Greater Cleveland area, but most of the original Rusyn neighborhoods had long been abandoned. In 2009, the Carpatho-Rusyn Heritage Museum opened at the St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Parma to educate the public about the history and culture of Rusyns.
Pastor of Holy Ghost Greek Catholic Church, Reverent Jseph Hanulya, was also the head of the Rusin Cultural Garden Association. In May, 1952, Hanulya unveiled a bust of Alexander Duchnovich. A Greek Catholic priest, Alexander Duchnovich (1803-1865) wrote prose and poetry in the Rusyn language, and also wrote the Rusyn National Anthem. The bust has since been stolen and no longer stands in the garden.
The Cultural Gardens have often incorporated symbolism or design elements that subverted the message of unity and reflected ethnic tensions in Europe and Cleveland. Clever choices of sculptures and honorees by ethnic communities also brought the conflicts so evident in Europe and its history to the chain of gardens. An example of this sort of conflict can be found in the Rusin Garden's choice to honor Alexander Duchnovich; a champion of Rusyn language and identity who defended the Rusyn language from Hungarian rule in the nineteenth century. Both the Slovak and Czech gardens celebrated similar themes. It was no mistake that the Czech, Slovak, and Rusin gardens arrayed themselves across a boundary street from the contiguous German and Hungarian gardens. Location can sometimes suggest just how powerfully old cultural conflicts were felt.
]]>Holy Ghost Byzantine Catholic Church opened in Tremont in 1910 to serve Rusyn (also spelled Rusin) immigrants from Central Europe. Rusyns (not to be confused with Russians) are a Slavic ethnic group with a distinct language and culture. They hailed from the Carpathian Mountains in east Slovakia, west Ukraine, southeast Poland and the northern tip of Romania. The Byzantine Catholicism that many Rusyns practice originated with the successful efforts of the Roman Catholic Church to convert the Eastern Orthodox peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Rusyns first immigrated to the Hungarian community on Cleveland’s east side in the 1890s and later to Tremont—often working in the steel mills and other industries that dotted the Flats. By 1909, two Greek Catholic churches (they weren't referred to as "Byzantine" until the mid-20th century) had been built in Cleveland, but most parishioners had to travel across the Cuyahoga River and the railroad track to attend liturgies on Sundays and holy days. To meet the growing parish’s needs, Holy Ghost Greek Catholic (now called Byzantine Catholic) Church was granted a charter by the state of Ohio on October 8, 1909. When it opened the next year, Holy Ghost—built for a cost of $15,000—was the first Byzantine Catholic church on the city's west side. Within ten years, parish families numbered 400. Around that time, an orphanage was established to provide for victims of the great influenza epidemic. Holy Ghost also became the first U. S. Home for the Sisters of St. Basil the Great, who staffed the orphanage until its closing in 1923.
By 1938, Holy Ghost had grown to nearly nine hundred families and some 150 of these formed St. Mary Church on West 35th St., now State Road and Biddulph Avenue. Some 3,000 souls were nurtured by Holy Ghost at the time of its Golden Jubilee celebration in 1959, but the changing neighborhood and exodus of many parishioners to the suburbs were beginning to take their toll. The church closed in 2009.
]]>St. Theodosius Russian Orthodox Cathedral opened in 1913 and cost approximately $70,000 to construct. Most of the land-acquisition and building funds came from parishioners. However, it is believed that Russia's Czar Nicholas II—the one whose entire family was murdered during the Revolution of 1917—also contributed. Cleveland architect Frederick C. Baird designed the church, modeling it after the Church of our Savior Jesus Christ in Moscow. St. Theodosius's thirteen onion-shaped domes–actually one onion dome and 12 cupolas–represent Jesus and the 12 Apostles, and are a prominent part of the Tremont skyline. St. Theodosius was the site for a number of scenes in the 1978 movie The Deer Hunter.
The first Orthodox parish in Cleveland, St. Theodosius was founded in 1896 by a small group of Carpatho-Rusyns whose religion was called Greek Catholic. These people were not Greek, but rather emigrants from Austria-Hungary who changed their religious loyalty from the Pope in Rome to the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church—thus re-aligning themselves with Russian, rather than Rusyn, Orthodox Christianity. In the same year that the parish was founded, the group's religious society, the Russian Saint Michael Rosko Orthodox Society, purchased land at the corner of Literary Road and McKinstry Street (West 6th Street) and constructed a small, wood-framed building on the site that served as the parish's first church. The church's first pastor was Rev. Victor Stepanoff, a Russian priest sent to Cleveland by the Bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church of North America.
While the church was founded by Rusyns, St. Theodosius also ministered in the early twentieth century to several other ethnic groups that had not yet established their own ethnic churches. According to a 1901 article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, parish membership including several hundred Rusyns, as well as "ten Russians, a few Greeks, and about 30 Syrians." Romanians also worshiped at the original building at Literary and McKinstry prior to the construction of St. Mary Romanian Orthodox Church on Warren Road in 1908.
The move to St. Theodosius's new home in 1913 symbolized the parish's rapid growth at the beginning of the 20th-century. The new cathedral, which has a cornerstone identifying the building as a Greek Catholic Russian Orthodox parish—that is, no longer under the auspices of Rome—was built during the tenure of the church's third pastor, Rev. William Lisenkovsky. The second pastor, who followed Rev. Stepanoff, was Rev. Jason Kappandze, whose grandson with the same name served the church as pastor in the 1990s. The first Rev. Kappandze served the parish from 1902-1908. In 1904, Rev. Kappandze, who was said to have come from a military family in Russia, received permission from the Czar of Russia to serve as a chaplain for Russian troops fighting in the Russo-Japanese War.
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