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.