Rochdale Friends of Tourcoing welcome speaker from Friends of Lviv

Rochdale Friends of Tourcoing welcome Anna Kecyk, Anna Lyssejko and Taras Melnyk from the Friends of Lviv Group

Rochdale Friends of Tourcoing welcomed Anna Kecyk, Anna Lyssejko and Taras Melnyk from the Friends of Lviv Group to speak at their meeting on Thursday 1 October.

The group were also joined by five members of the Friends of Bielefeld Association as part of their plans to occasionally link the groups together for mutual help and shared interests.

Anna Kecyk and Anna Lyssejok brought an assortment of beautiful and interesting artefacts to the group. Amongst them were some intricately decorated Easter eggs, dolls in national costume, other examples of Ukrainian embroidery such as their own ‘ethnic’ design blouses and a model of a typical farm house.

A presentation given to the group was illustrated by some slides and it covered aspects of Ukrainian history from the 10th century to the present day.

Successive invasions and exploitation by conquerors such as the Poles, Russians and Germans left the country with many problems but the worst impact of Russian ‘Collectivisation’ in the 1930s was that between seven and ten million Ukrainians died of starvation as their great wheat harvests were taken away to be eaten in Russia and all opposition was crushed. This tragedy is known as the ‘Holodomor’ and is remembered every year on the third Friday in November.

Rochdale is the first town in Britain to have a memorial erected to those lost in the Holodomor. It stands in the Memorial Gardens opposite Rochdale Town Hall and each year a short service is held, which is attended by members of the Ukrainian Community, councillors and members of twinning groups.

The group were told that the current situation in Ukraine is grave and worrying. The Pro-Western movement by the government has led to an intervention by Russia and many have died, especially in the industrial east of the country.

The Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain has written letters deploring the decision to allow Vladimir Putin to speak at the UN last week.

A spokesperson for Friends of Tourcoing said: “We are grateful to these members of the Friends of Lviv, our twin town in Ukraine, for this informative talk and wish them and their ancestral home well in the future.”