Rusin Garden

In June 1939, the plot of land that makes up the Rusin Cultural Garden, located along East Boulevard, was dedicated. Rusins, sometimes called Carpatho-Russians (based on a common mispronunciation) or Carpatho-Rusyns, emigrated to Cleveland from the Carpathian Mountains, primarily in the period from 1880 to World War I. Immigrants from the Carpathian Mountains were sometimes called Rusins or Ruthenian—especially those belonging to the Byzantine Rite Catholic Church, and other immigrants from the Galicia region of the Carpathian Mounts were called Lemkos. Cleveland had what might have been the single settlement of Rusins in the world during the 1930s, when over 30,000 Rusins lived in the city.
The head of the Rusin Cultural Garden Association, Reverend Joseph Hanulya, who was pastor of Holy Ghost Greek Catholic Church, unveiled a bust of Alexander Duchnovich in May 1952. A Greek Catholic priest, Alexander Duchnovich, wrote the Rusin national anthem, and in his writings sought to unify Carpatho-Rusins. The bust has since been stolen and no longer stands in the garden
The gardens often have incorporated symbolism or design elements that subverted the message of unity and reflected ethnic tensions in Europe and Cleveland. Clever choices of sculpture and honorees by ethnic communities also brought the conflicts so evident in Europe and its history to the chain of gardens. An example of this sort of conflict can be found when the Rusins in Cleveland honored Alexander Duchnovich who wrote the Rusin national anthem and defended the Rusin language from Hungarian rule in the nineteenth century. Both the Slovak and Czech gardens celebrated similar themes; it was no mistake that the Czech, Slovak, and Rusin gardens were arrayed themselves across a boundary street from the contiguous German and Hungarian gardens, suggesting how powerfully old cultural conflicts were felt.
MTT