A hundred names are cut into the slab beside the sculpture. They belong to people from Kolochava who died working away from home in the fifty years before it went up, and the figure came out of a survey run in the village rather than from an estimate: roughly two deaths a year, most of them men in their twenties and thirties. Kolochava is better known for its museums. This is not one of them.
The composition shows a departure. A man with a bag over his shoulder is leaving; his small daughter has hold of him; his wife stands alongside, pregnant, another child on her arm. There is nothing to decode. People here can generally tell you which year in their own family it corresponds to.
It was unveiled on 8 May 2011, on Village Day, and was reported at the time as the first monument in Ukraine to labour migrants. The sculptor was Petro Shtaier, a member of the Union of Artists of Ukraine who was born here and has made most of the monuments along this road. The initiative and the funding came from Stanislav Arzhevitin, the Kolochava native and former People's Deputy behind the village's museums.
Arzhevitin's reasoning was straightforward. He kept hearing, on visits home, that someone else had been killed working abroad, and a survey of the village put a number to it: over fifty years more than a hundred people from Kolochava had died away from home. Safety breaches, accidents, illness, the conditions of the work. At the unveiling he said no war had cost Kolochava as many lives as going away to earn had.
The monument stands in the middle of the village at the bus stop, on the ground Kolochava calls Na Shyrokykh. That is the whole argument of the siting. This is where families walked their people to the bus, and where several generations of them did it; the spot carried the meaning before the bronze arrived.
Visitors photograph it, as visitors do. Most work out within a minute or so that it is not a cheerful roadside attraction, and the group goes quiet.
Leaving to earn is not a post-Soviet development in these valleys. Between the late 1870s and 1914 something like 225,000 Carpatho-Rusyns left the Austro-Hungarian highlands for the industrial states of America, overwhelmingly men who meant to send money home and come back; they were leaving the same subsistence smallholdings on the same slopes. The destinations have changed — for Kolochava it is now mostly Czechia — and the pattern has not.
The monument settles none of this, which is what makes it hold up. For some families the years away bought a house, a car, an education for the children. For others they produced a line on the slab. The sculpture shows the departure and lets both readings stand.
One local custom is worth knowing before you walk up to the cemetery. In Transcarpathia a kurahov is a wedding banner; in Kolochava a white one is set on the grave of an unmarried young man. They are visible from the path, and once you know what they mark the graveyard reads differently.
The monument makes a sensible place to start a walk through the village: the Stare Selo skansen and its narrow-gauge railway, the Old School with its Czech and Soviet classrooms, the Olbracht museum, the Arpad Line exposition, and the Church of the Holy Spirit up at the Horb end. Come in late March or April and the skansen meadows are under crocus.
Пам’ятник «Заробітчанам» відтворює сумну картину прощання чоловіка із сім’єю. Голова сім’ї із торбою вирушає у світ далекий, його на прощання обіймає маленька дочка. Поруч стоїть зажурена вагітна дружина із дитятком на руках. Збоку на плиті викарбувані сто імен загиблих на заробітках колочавців. Композиція стоїть у центрі села - «На Широких». Місце символічне – адже звідси не одне покоління колочавців проводжало своїх близьких на заробітки.
Якщо не знати де він знаходиться легко пройти повз через те, що знаходиться між магазинами.
Пам'ятник дуже символічний.
Розміщення не зовсім вдале, між магазинами.
