The Borders of Western Boyko Land

By reminding the criteria of separation of Boyko Land as a cultural and historic territory and the Boykos as an ethnographic group the author aims to convince that we are not dealing with history of exploring the ethnographic areas, but the history of inventing them. Talking about the Boykos in Boyko Land is synonymous with commitment to a number of ideas from the history of science, the old concepts of culture, folk culture, ethnicity, cultural-historical school and anthropogeoghraphy, physical anthropology, and physiognomies, folklore and ethnography. Contrary to Boyko Land researchers the author claim that since the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present day in Ukraine they deal not with a great ethnic group – the Boykos, but with many local communities of Ruthenian mountaineers – the ethnographic groups. The old and popular in the north-eastern Carpathians depreciating words related to the alien, such as “Boyko” or “Lemko”, were released from the meaning by the intellectuals who were engaged in science, literature and politics in order to apply them to name the groups and their territories.