Franko’s anniversary celebrations in Ivano-Frankivsk included also My Franko essay competition that attracted youths not only from Ivano-Frankivsk region, but neighboring regions, too. Olena Vodoshniak, a 10th form student at the First Ukrainian Gymnasium, was awarded the prize for the best essay by the jury chairman writer Stepan Protsiuk. The Franko readings participants were greeted by the classic’s great-granddaughter Olesia Franko who had arrived from Kalush.
The celebrations of Franko’s 156th anniversary began near the monument to the author. Almost 30 locals gathered in Ivano-Frankivsk to make a daring attempt to publicly recite their favorite passages from Franko. The monument in Ivano-Frankivsk was approached once again by a lady with a bouquet of asters. The former elementary school teacher brings home-grown flowers each year on August 27 on occasion of Franko’s birthday.
That evening, the locals read little-known passages from Franko. The traditional Franko readings had as their leitmotif this time the following words by the “Great Stonecutter”: “Acquire knowledge, theoretical as well as practical, strengthen your will, educate yourselves to be serious and respectable, full of love for your people and able to manifest that love with restless, silent toil rather than streams of noisy phrases.” Therefore, they recited not only better-known Franko’s poems, but also his essay Something about Myself from the author’s foreword to the Polish translation of his works – that notorious essay in which Franko said: “I dislike Ruthenians” – as well as The Painted Fox (a very timely text for modern Ukraine!), an excerpt from The Parable of Beauty, and love poems.
The monument to Franko has been unveiled in Kolomyia, another place in Prykarpattia. The author had been to the town 10 times. He saw this “scenic town on the Prut River” for the first time on March 1, 1880. Three days later, Franko and his comrades were arrested in Yabluniv on the way to Nyzhnii Bereziv on suspicion of socialist propaganda by Austrian gendarmes and imprisoned in the Kolomyia town hall that doubled as the town jail. He stayed under arrest for three months.
It was there, in Kolomyia, that “the Great Stonecutter” wrote his Hymn (The Eternal Spirit of Revolt…) which Mykola Lysenko set to music, “At the Courtroom”; “Blow, Wind, Blow, over the Jail”; “Truth Is Savaged Everywhere”; and “Message to the Comrades from the Jail.” Franko read his Moses to Kolomyia citizens in the local National House in 1912. The town was the place of first publication for Franko’s From Hills and Valleys, Zakhar Berkut, and Fateful Crossroads.
