Who are the Golden Girls of Prospect Cemetery?

January 5, 2019 9:20 PM

What is the story behind an uncommon burial plot in Toronto - with a tombstone that reads "friends" and occupied by four unrelated women? It is a story about the Carpatho-Russians, immigration, the Depression, Communism, the card game hola, and the friendship of four women.
posted by thecjm (6 comments total)

I read this an hour or so ago. Somewhere around the point of the diehard communist evangelizer, things take on a Coen Brothers tinge.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:58 PM on January 5, 2019 [1 favorite]

It got a little dusty in here.
posted by scruss at 9:04 AM on January 6, 2019

Fascinating. Thanks for posting this.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:33 AM on January 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

Sent this to my dearest folks. This is the kind of life-sustaining friendship I wish for everyone.
posted by Hopeful and Cynical at 3:27 PM on January 6, 2019

Wow, this is something I have a long simmering interest in. Russians - Rusyns - Ruthenians has some serious political implications (well it did, the issue has been long settled)... these guys were a tiny batch of Slavs at the very far end of the Carpathians, distinct ethnicity, and in the interwar years the Eastern end of Czechoslovakia... initially a three-way unity of Czechs, Slovaks, and Ruthenians. You never really hear about it but that bit was also a part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Soviet gobbling up of territories on their Western border at the start of WW2. So it is part of Ukraine now, and I suppose that these folk have been heavily pressured to assimilate culturally. Wonder to what extent Ruthenia is still a distinct concept and cultural / ethnic entity?
posted by Meatbomb at 3:43 PM on January 6, 2019 [2 favorites]

I love this story.
posted by Salamandrous at 6:36 AM on January 20, 2019