Kamenyar

Kamenyar is a Slavic word meaning stone cutter in a quarry, or quarryman.

Monument to Ukrainian poet Ivan Franko who is depicted as a stone breaker (Kamenyar).

The word became particularly famous during Soviet times because of the revolutionary poem "Kamenyari" (Ukrainian: Каменярі, plural of Каменяр), by Ukrainian poet Ivan Franko (1856–1916). In this poem, slaves bound by chains smash through rock using sledgehammers. The poem is allegorical, describing the twin ideas of liberation from an oppressive past (Polish, Russian and Austro-Hungarian rule of Ukraine) and of the laying down of a highway for future social progress by pioneers.[1][2]

The stone breaker Kamenyar became a revolutionary symbol in Ukrainian and wider soviet culture as well as a metaphorical name for Ivan Franko himself.

Notes and references

1. The poem Kamenyari, translated into English as The Pioneers, The Ukrainian Weekly section in Svoboda, May 29, 1946, page 2
2. Ivan Franko, the Poet of Western Ukraine: Selected Poems. / Translated with a biographical introduction by Percival Cundy. Edited by Clarence A. Manning. New York: Philosophical Library, 1948. 265 pages.

See also

• 2428 Kamenyar, an asteroid of an asteroid belt that is classified as a minor planet and was discovered by the Russian astronomer Nikolai Chernykh in 1977 who was working at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory