Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village

Today my mother and I took the motorcycles out to the Ukrainian Village 45min outside of Edmonton. It was their opening weekend with perfect weather and very few people. The fresh air and beautiful surroundings was a great start to the long weekend.

They have a lot of old style buildings to sketch and its fun learning about the history of the Ukrainian people. It's like fort Edmonton but much more spread out. They have brought in old Ukrainian buildings from the surrounding area to put together what a town would have looked like back then. Close to the railway tracks, with a school, grocery store, churches and a grain elevator ready to serve the local farmers. The interpreters were quite informative and sometimes very entertaining. All in all its a great place to spend a day. 

With all we could do there my mother was a wonderful sport and let me do some sketching as well. My favorite part of the day was getting to sketch the clay oven they had at one of the farms.

They bake bread in this oven by making a fire inside to heat it up real good. Then when the fire burns out they clean out all the coals and ashes in order to place their bread in to bake. They say that the clay oven cooks the bread in about an hours time and I can only imagine the wonderful aroma that comes from that oven when they take the bread out.

This particular oven seen below had old lumber covering it to help it stay warm, however, after exploring the different settlements I noticed that this was a more primitive set up. The others often had a little hut built around them but it still served the same purpose. Its amazing the little pieces of information you can pick up in places like these. Not only did I come away with a fun sketch but also with some interesting facts and information.


Anyways, if you are looking for a good time and you've
been to Fort Edmonton a little too often, maybe you'd like to check out the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village. By the way, they give free wagon rides :) Just saying.