«Smerekova Hata» — Nazariy Yaremchuk’s first house.
Vizhnitsa is one of the smallest Bukovyna towns. It is located between the rivers Cheremosh and Vyzhentsa, and on the cordon between Chernivtsi and Ivano-Frankivsk regions, the main beauties of Western Ukraine.
Translated from Moldavian, the word «Vizhnitsa» means «the beginning of the road». That is why it has long been the place where numerous merchants with red goods, as well as farmers, woodcutters and shepherds from all villages and settlements of the Vizhnitsa valley gathered for fairs, both under the Moldavian Principality and under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Thanks to the status of a fair town, which our settlement received in 1767, and the actively developing wood market, Vizhnitsa became the center of cultural life in Bukovina, attracting such «titans» as Olga Kobylianska and Lesya Ukrainka, Yuriy Fedkovych and Ivan Franko to saturate it with authentic color. Therefore, the birth in these parts of the main macho of the national pop music of the last years of the USSR and the first years of life of young Ukraine can be considered not a coincidence, but a regularity. We are talking about Nazariy Yaremchuk, whose museum-estate is considered one of the main current attractions of the former fair town and a reliable «bait» for numerous tourists.
The museum is located on the outskirts of Vizhnitsa, in the Rovnia village, which is now part of the city limits. This is the parental hut of the Yaremchuk family, where Nazariy lived until he was 12 years old. The thing is that the future Bukovynian nightingale was born when his father was already 64 years old. After his father’s death, the housewife mother could not support all her four children on her own and the boy was sent to a boarding school in Vizhnitsa.
Museum-Mansion of Nazariy Yaremchuk.
The house itself is an example of a typical hut of a hard-working Bukovyna peasant, steadfastly withstanding the collectivization onslaughts of the Soviet power. Nazariy Yaremchuk, the singer’s father, built a sturdy, one-story house for his family, with a high roof, imitating the steepness of the slopes of the surrounding mountains. It is almost in pristine condition. Only the old slate roof was replaced with a tile roof and relatives attached a memorial plaque indicating that the People’s Artist of the Ukrainian SSR was born and lived in this place.
The house itself preserves the atmosphere of Bukovyna village hut of the mid-20th century, the whole discography of «Leleki z Ukrainy» is collected, his first stage costumes and awards are exhibited. The museum-house has its own name — «Smerekova Khata», in honor of one of the most sentimental hits performed by Yaremchuk since 1985.
It just so happens that this manor museum has become the most heartwarming attraction in Vizhnitsa. But the town has also preserved a whole host of sacral monuments — 2 wooden churches, church and a synagogue. All the temples date back to the XIX century, so vacation in Vizhnica can be a kind of excursion to the Bukovinian Jerusalem. Well, and in the «obligatory program» of any trip to Carpathians will include inspection of architectural curiosities of the Austro-Hungarian times, tasting the waters of local mineral springs and delightful trekking along the paths and meadows of the surrounding mountains.