image credit: Wikimedia Commons
My maiden name is Chomiak, anglicized from the Ukrainian, Хомяк. When I was a little girl I asked my father how to pronounce it and what it meant. The son of Ukrainian immigrants, he spoke Ukrainian fluently. But however hard I tried to copy him I couldn’t master the starting “kh” sound of the name. “What kind of Ukrainian are you?” he would tease me. He then told me the name translated to hamster, and I thought he must have been kidding.
The other day my sister was doing a Google search on our surname and stumbled across this page on Peapix: Trees on the northern slope of Mount Khomyak in the Carpathian Mountains, Ukraine. When she sent me the link I was amazed! We have our very own mountain namesake!!!
Apparently Mount Khomyak is a popular Ukrainian hiking destination. It is 5,059 feet tall. The Visit Ukraine website says that it gets its name from its peak, which resembles the back of an alpine hamster. (Well, there you go, Papa wasn’t kidding!) The top is completely covered with stones, and lower elevations have green meadows and coniferous woodlands. I thoroughly enjoyed looking at all this beautiful mountain’s pictures on the Visit Ukraine website.
My heart is still broken over the invasion of and endless war in Ukraine. But it was fascinating to learn something more about the land of some of my ancestors.
What a wonderful picture and a touching post to your roots – yet a reminder of the senseless war. Peace to your pride.
Thank you, Frank. It was a delightful discovery that clarified a distant memory. You never know what will come along in life to shed more light on the past.
Interesting discovery! The lichen encrusted stones look like they were scooped up by giants and placed in a big pile. 🙂
The picture you painted made me smile! 🙂 How I would have loved the chance to climb “my” mountain when I was younger.
Barbara, I’m convinced your father is looking down on you and saying “and my little girl looked at me so skeptically and now she knows I was not pulling the wool over her eyes.” That was an exciting find and I’m sure you were excited to read that tidbit.
I do wonder now if Papa had something to do with helping my sister stumble across the existence of this mountain with our family name. 😉 I doubt he never knew of it when he was alive, and I wonder if his parents even knew about it. My grandfather believed the world was flat his whole life, no matter how much my father tried to convince him otherwise.
It is entirely possible Barbara – a sign from above that led your sister down that road. If only your grandfather could have seen the online information about what we know about the earth and our world that we know today. We just had encyclopedias and “National Geographic” magazines and TV shows back then. The resources of the internet are so wonderful sometimes and not just for blogging!
That’s so true. I often wonder what people who lived in another era would be like if they grew up in ours. There are pictures of historical people and what they might look like if they lived now. But it’s also fun to imagine if their personalities would be any different, too.
I think one item of interest would be how informal people are now compared to back then. People were likely a lot more respectful to one another, but I think they would be surprised at how casual people are toward one another. Imagine people who wake up from comas and are amazed at newfangled devices available now. There was a man a few years ago, who was fixated on cellphones. I worked with a woman who suddenly had a traumatic brain injury and didn’t know what common things were used for (soap, cup, silverware) and had to be taught again. She too was fascinated with smartphones.
How fascinating! Lucky you, having your own mountain! I pray every day for that war to be peacefully resolved — so much misery comes about when nations can’t get along.
The war news is very discouraging and I also pray daily for all the people caught up in the conflict. But it was fun to learn about that mountain that looks like the back of an alpine hamster, which are wild and bigger than our domestic ones.
What an interesting find for you and your sister, Barbara. Happy Birthday Month to YOU! 🎈🥳🎈🎁🎈🥳🎈🎂🎈