Poland –
Those Boikos are the most mysterious tribe the length and breadth of the Carpathians. No-one else is quite so troublesome. The Boikos are a little mute. They are incapable of talking about themselves.
They are so vivid, when you are among them, yet become slippery, like their waters, when you try to somehow define them.
They have so many objects and gestures that have disappeared everywhere else, and they have so little of everything that is already everywhere.
Taras Prokhas’ko, transl. Uilleam Blacker
A Boiko village in the Ukrainian Carpathian Mountains fit my idea of the rural life in its primal form perfectly. I found myself in a world where the events have magical causes, where white magic confronts black magic and good struggles with evil – in a world I knew only from the fairy tales I was told as a child.
The BOIKO book Photography feature – Jan Brykczynski was self-published in 2014.
