The Rusyns, Slovakia

If you're an Andy Warhol fan, where do you go to find the largest concentration of his works in one place? Well, you could try the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the city where the pop artist was born and raised. Housed in a converted warehouse, the museum has more than 500 of Warhol's works.

Or you could come to Medzilaborce (pop. 6,500), an impoverished town in northeastern Slovakia that boasts the world's second largest museum dedicated to Warhol's life and work. Here you'll find some 160 original prints and drawings, Warhol's leather jacket and family memorabilia. "If you want to know Andy Warhol the superstar, go to Pittsburgh," says Michal Bycko, 52, who founded the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art in 1991. "But if you want to know him as a person, and what he was like before he became famous, you need to come to Medzilaborce."

What's an artist like Warhol doing in a place like Medzilaborce? His parents were born in the village of Mikova, a stretch of modest homes along a single-lane road about 14 km from Medzilaborce. While Warhol himself never visited, Bycko insists that the region's peasant mentality and religious iconography were a profound influence on his art.

The museum, housed in a boxy communist-era palace of culture, is partly a tourist attraction; it draws as many as 17,000 people a year to this deeply rural region of undulating fields and scarecrows. But Bycko says it's also a statement of defiance. Warhol's parents were Rusyns, also known as Ruthenians, members of a Slavic tribe that settled in this part of Slovakia after the 6th century. The museum, Bycko says, is a way of keeping Rusyn culture alive: "An identification with Warhol boosts people's self-confidence. They no longer need to be ashamed of being Rusyn."

In this neglected part of the country, where alcoholism is rampant and jobs are scarce, there's not a lot else to be proud of. The Rusyns — who speak a distinct language and are renowned for their exquisite wooden churches, often built without nails — have been stubbornly resisting assimilation and natural disasters for centuries. Some 1.2 million Rusyns are currently estimated to be living in Central and Eastern Europe. Under Czechoslovakia's communist regime in the early 1950s, they were declared to be Ukrainians and their Greek Catholic church was abolished. In Ukraine, where an estimated 740,000 Rusyns live, the government has yet to recognize them as a separate ethnicity.

The pressure has taken its toll. In present-day Slovakia, the number of people declaring themselves to be of Rusyn nationality dropped from 110,000 in 1910 to just over 24,000 in 2001. Today, many Rusyns struggle with the Cyrillic script of their written language, and a growing number of parents find it more convenient to raise their children speaking only Slovak. Rusyn culture, says Bycko, a melancholy former bar musician and recovering alcoholic, is "like a terminal patient who rallies enough to get out of bed but dies shortly afterward."

Paul Robert Magocsi, a Rusyn expert at the University of Toronto and editor of the Encyclopedia of Rusyn History and Culture, is a bit more optimistic. "There have always been dire predictions," he says. "Rusyns, like many other national minorities, aren't going to go away. Ten years from now, we will be in more or less the same situation as we are now." That situation may not be quite fatal, but it's certainly fragile, kind of like local interest in the world's most famous Rusyn.

Despite Medzilaborce's efforts to rebrand itself as Warhol City — two E.U. grants are currently paying for new façades, bus stops and other infrastructure, all in the style of Warhol's Pop Art — only about 3% of visitors to the museum are from the region. "The attitude is the same as toward Rusyn identity," Bycko says. "People have other things to worry about."

As a result, Rusyn identity is slowly being whittled away by economic hardship, flight to the cities and plain old indifference. "An apocalypse will strike the Rusyns within two generations," predicts Michal Smajda, 84, a Rusyn writer and ethnographer. "Children are not being born, our youth are going abroad in search of jobs, and the elderly are departing for eternity." You need look no farther than Andy Warhol's parents' hometown to see the effects. Mikova currently has a population of 162, of whom more than half are retired, and unemployment is running at 30%. There's no longer a school, a pub or weekend bus connections. "The community is dying," says Alexander Vaco, the 58-year-old mayor.

Still, there are some signs of life. Slovakia's Rusyns are now recognized by the state as an ethnic minority, their language is taught in more than a dozen schools, and in the 2001 census, the number of Slovaks who gave their nationality as Rusyn jumped by 7,200 to 24,000, a 40% increase over 1991. This modest resurgence is thanks largely to groups like Rusinska obroda (Rusyn Revival), one of a handful of Rusyn organizations that sprang up in Slovakia after 1989 to revivify the beleaguered community by publishing newspapers and books, organizing culture and sporting events, and lobbying the government. In the run-up to the 2001 census, Rusinska obroda activists went door-to-door to persuade people to declare themselves Rusyn. The Slovak Rusyn community is "the most vibrant" in Europe, says Rusyn scholar Magocsi.

For that state of affairs, thanks are due to people like Father Frantisek Krajnak, 49, a soft-spoken Greek Catholic priest from Medzilaborce who's battling to make sure the Rusyn language continues to be used in church services. Krajnak fears that the language's disappearance from religious services will only hasten its decline. "Our language is a treasure that informs our culture," he says. Krajnak has a long history of speaking up for his culture. In the 1980s, when the communist regime in Czechoslovakia banned his translations of religious texts into Rusyn, he distributed them secretly. He's equally undeterred today when confronting the bureaucracy of the Greek Catholic church in Slovakia over the appointment of a Rusyn Bishop, a position Krajnak feels would be an important symbol of cultural identity.

Despite the leap in Rusyn numbers, Bycko is convinced his people will eventually be relegated to the status of a cultural curiosity. He cites the 13th Annual Festival of Rusyn Culture, which took place last year in Mikova and is dedicated to Warhol, as a case in point. Several hundred people gathered to watch an afternoon of folk songs and dance, but Bycko calls it a "drunken ball" of little value for the preservation of Rusyn culture. "It's not enough to dust off the relics of Rusyn culture the way that it was circa 1820," he says. "One needs to look for contemporary forms that reflect the fact that we are living today." The Rusyns could really use another Andy Warhol.