Open to the public from the May long weekend to Labour Day, the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village (Ukrainian: Село спадщини української культури, romanized: Selo spadshchyny ukrains’koi kul’tury) is an open-air museum that uses costumed historical interpreters to recreate pioneer settlements in east central Alberta, Canada, northeast and east of Edmonton. In particular it shows the lives of Ukrainian Canadian settlers from the years 1899 to 1930. Buildings from surrounding communities have been moved to the historic site and restored to various years within the first part of the twentieth century.
"The Village", as it is colloquially known, has a very strong commitment to historical authenticity and the concept of living history. The Village uses a technique known as first-person interpretation which requires that the costumed performers remain in character at all times (or as much as is feasibly possible). Actors answer all questions as if it is the year their building portrays. Although this technique is startling for some visitors at first, it allows for a much stronger experience of immersion in history than traditional third-person interpretation, where the actor acknowledges that he is, in fact, in a museum.
Home Grain Co. Elevator, built circa 1922, restored to 1929 appearance.
Note: the spellings used for names and locations are those from the time to which the building has been restored, and may not match those in use today
Name (indicates the name of the owners or operators of a building and its original location), as well as the time period to which it has been restored
Overview
An interpreter from the Village
Provides an introduction to Galician and Bukovinian immigration to Canada by showing the homes of three settler families. Iwan Pylypow was one of two individuals who set off the mass migration of Ukrainians to Canada at the end of the 19th century. His family was Galician. His third house in Canada is preserved at the Village. The second house is that of Mykhailo and Vaselina Hawreliak. The Hawreliaks were a large Ukrainian Bukovinian family who settled in the Shandro area. By the 1920s Mykhailo Hawreliak was quite successful, and the house preserved here has five bedrooms and a cistern that collected rainwater for use in the kitchen. The Nazar Yurko family was also from Bukovina, but was of Romanian descent.
The "burdei" at the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village.
Shows different farmyards from different eras/stages of development.
Township Survey Marker (Reconstruction to circa 1892) – marked the corner of a Township (36 square miles), containing 160 acre plots of land available under the Dominion Lands Act for homesteading. The townships were surveyed prior to the mass influx of European immigration to the Canadian Prairies[8]
The newly arrived immigrants
Burdei – Based on field research and archaeological findings; reconstructed to 1900 - Temporary shelters dug out of the ground or into
the side of a hill were a common feature of the earliest farms of the Ukrainian immigrant settlers.
^A misnomer applied by Northern European Canadians who, at the time of the establishment of the school district, mistakenly understood that the local residents (who referred to themselves as "rusyny" – Ruthenians,) were Russian. The name of the school district was changed in the early 1930s to "Franko" school, after the famous Western Ukrainian poet and writer, Ivan Franko.
