Bodružal is a tiny Rusyn village in the far northeast of Slovakia, close to the Polish border, with a few dozen houses scattered along a valley among the forested hills of the Low Beskids. What brings people here is its wooden church of St Nicholas, built in 1658, a three-domed Greek Catholic church with shingled walls and onion-shaped towers stepping up from east to west. It is one of the eight churches in the UNESCO listing of the wooden churches of the Slovak part of the Carpathian mountain area, and it is a perfect example of the Lemko style: compact, harmonious and rooted in its landscape. Inside, the iconostasis glows with painted saints.
This is a borderland with a complicated history. The Rusyns, or Lemkos, an Eastern Slavic people who have lived in these hills for centuries, have seen borders, empires and nations shift around them. In the autumn of 1944, the Dukla Pass, just a few kilometres away, saw one of the bloodiest battles on the Eastern Front, as Soviet and Czechoslovak forces fought to break through German defences into Slovakia. Tens of thousands died, and the area around Svidník is full of memorials, military cemeteries and old tanks left in the fields.
The landscape is gentle and green: rolling hills, beech and fir forests, meadows full of wildflowers in summer and small villages with wooden houses. Wildlife includes deer, wild boar, and even bears and wolves in the deeper forests. The roads are narrow and quiet, mostly asphalt but often patched, with some lovely flowing curves through the valleys and over the low passes. Traffic is light, though tractors and gravel on the corners keep you honest.
Bodružal itself has no services. Svidník, eleven kilometres down the valley, does, with fuel, supermarkets, restaurants and the Museum of Ukrainian Culture with an open-air village of wooden buildings. Medzilaborce, to the east, is home to the Andy Warhol museum, since his parents emigrated from a Rusyn village nearby. Try bryndzové halušky, potato dumplings with sheep's cheese, and in autumn, the region's mushrooms. The church is usually locked; look for a phone number on the gate or ask in the village for the key.