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Taste Of Poland In Valley
Gallery
Polish cultural day features food, arts, dance and pirogi corn hole
By ELISE McKEOWN SKOLNICK
VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT
1People packed the church Sunday for Polish Day, an event sponsored by PolishYoungstown.
The event is meant “to raise awareness of Polish culture and give everybody in the Valley a chance to have a taste of Poland,” said Aundrea Cika, director of PolishYoungstown.
It started small last year, Cika said, but this year’s event was a full-blown festival, lasting 8 Ω hours.
In addition to traditional Polish food, such as pirogi, haluski, and potato pancakes, the day included children’s activities, Polka music, folk dancing, and accordion lessons.
Among the other activities, an amber specialist and Polish pottery specialist gave workshops throughout the day.
“So you get a real taste of Poland,” Cika said. “Then we have a whole children’s program where the kids do, say corn hole, but it’s corn hole with pirogi.”
Face painting and a coloring contest were also offered.
Dee Tripp of Ellsworth attended for the first time.
“My Aunt Helen [Yurko] is visiting from Florida and she loves to Polka, so we thought this would be a good, entertaining afternoon for her,” Tripp said.
Both found the food delicious.
“The potato pancake is the best,” Tripp said. “The potato pancake’s awesome.”
She also had stuffed cabbage, kielbasa and haluski, foods she grew up with.
The amber and pottery workshops were on Tripp’s and Yurko’s to-do list for the day.
Amber is “a very important part of Poland’s history,” said Holly Chmil of Amberjewelry.com, a vendor at the event. “The amber road is to Poland and Europe what the silk road was to China.”
The Scranton, Pa.-based company represents 40 to 50 small shops in Poland.
The festival was amazing, Chmil said.
“It looks like there’s a really thriving vibrant [Polish] community,” she said. “I think people are really interested in learning about their heritage. When people came to this country, they kind of wanted to forget their past, they wanted to forget all of those tensions and the conflicts. And now the younger generations really crave that knowledge of our heritage and our history, so there’s a lot of interest.”
Heritage is what brought her to the event, Billie Lyda said. The Canfield woman looked at the many displays of Polish items with her grandaughter, Delanie Burnell, age 8, while Burnell was waiting for her favorite Polish food, pirogi.
“We just lost my father-in-law,” Lyda said. “And this is a tribute to him because he’d want us to be here. We were here with him last year, and he’d want us to be here.”
PolishYoungstown is an umbrella organization, made up of representatives of area Polish organizations.
It was created in 2008 to inspire, promote and educate the Mahoning Valley on all things Polish.