Philologists, who chase
A panting syllable through time and space,
Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark,
To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah’s Ark.
William Cowper (1731-1800)
For a short period in 2014, the name of the central square in Kyiv called the “Maidan” became known throughout the civilized world. That was because it was the place where the Ukrainian people gathered to overthrow the unpopular regime of Viktor Yanukovych, who appeared to be attempting to set up a new dictatorship in Ukraine with renewed ties to Russia. This pro-Western, pro-EU, democratic movement, came to be called by Ukrainians the Revolution of Dignity, or “the Euro-Maidan.” The “Euro” part of this word was clear to all. But for Westerners the “maidan” part required some explanation by visiting journalists who, however, generally ignored it or, at most, stated simply that it was a Ukrainian word for “town square.”
Little did the Western public know that this was only a very small part of the story, for although the word “maidan” was used in Kyiv and some other eastern Ukrainian cities with the meaning of town square, it was less used in western Ukraine, where the old Slavonic word “ploshcha” (square) and the loan from German via Polish “rynok” (marketplace), were more frequently employed. So where does the word “maidan” come from? And why does it remain well-known in the East, but unknown in the Western world, unfamiliar to other Slavic lands to the west, and even little-known in western Ukraine?
The simple answer to this question is that “maidan” (sometimes spelled “maydan” or “majdan”) is a loan word into Ukrainian (and also into Russian) from Turkish, or from the Turkic languages of Central Asia. In those tongues, a maidan was an open place where trade or military exercises took place. So, like very many other words of Turkic origin in Ukrainian – like Kozak (Cossack), otaman (military leader of the Cossacks), kish, or more frequently, kosh (army) and such – it came into Ukrainian from the languages of the Turks and Tatars of early modern times.
Of course, the story does not end there, because even in the Turkic languages “maidan” is not a native term, but rather is a loan word. In fact, it came into the Turkic languages from Persian (an Indo-European language), where it had pretty much the same meaning. The “maidan” (pronounced more like “meidan” in modern Persian) or central square of the magnificent old Iranian/Persian city of Isfahan is actually famous throughout the entire Islamic world!
This loan took place because the nomadic Turks and settled Iranians were in close contact with each other in central Asia from very early times. From Persian it also entered Arabic (probably shortly before, or after, the Muslim conquest of Iran in the 7th century), was given an Arabic twist by those early Arab conquerors, and then re-entered Persian in a slightly different form.
However, according to some philologists, even the Persians did not invent this word; rather these scholars derive it from Aramaic, an old Semitic language once spoken widely throughout the Middle East and used as an administrative language in the ancient Persian Empire. Aramaic, of course, is famous as “the language of Jesus and the first apostles,” as certain Christian immigrants to North America from Iraq, Iran and Syria, who today speak a more modern form of that language, are fond of pointing out to us.
But how has this very ancient Middle Eastern word been used over the centuries in Ukrainian and the other Slavonic languages, and what is its place in Ukrainian life and literature?
The Ukrainian encyclopedist Yevhen Onatsky sums it up most succinctly by giving three different meanings to the word: (1) A town square, especially a square with a marketplace or a “bazaar” (another Persian word, this one loaned into most of the European languages in the 18th century through their first acquaintance with the oriental tales of the “Thousand and One Nights,” sometimes called the “Arabian Nights”). (2) A workshop where tar or pitch or asphalt were produced. (3) An embankment in the form of a ring or circle created in ancient times, like the more famous burial mounds called “kurhany” or kurgans. These particular maidans are most common, says Onatsky, in Right-Bank Ukraine, in the territory stretching west from Kyiv. But our distinguished encyclopedist does not say how this oriental loan came to have all these different meanings, or, indeed, if it had more than one origin to account for more than one meaning.
Neither do Metropolitan Ilarion (Ohiienko) and Yurii Mulyk-Lutsyk, who compiled in Ukrainian a great four-volume “Etymological and Semantic Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language.” They do add, however, that in the 19th century the Austrian-ruled western parts of Ukraine became somewhat acquainted with the word through reading Ukrainian authors living in Russian-ruled Ukraine, such as Hanna Barvinok, Ivan Rudenko and Ivan Nechui-Levytsky, all of whom used one or another form of the word in their various works. In fact, Nechui seemed to like it quite a bit, for he used it quite often.
It also occurred in Ukrainian folklore collections compiled in Russian-ruled Ukraine that were read in western Ukraine. For example, the folklorist and student of historical songs, Amvrosii Metlynsky, cited a famous saying which I believe might be about the laggards who used to hang around the town squares: “Maidanchyky-okaianchyky, da hirka vasha dolia. Ne vmiyeste khliba-soly yisty da iz chuzhoho polia.”
In my not-so literal translation, this reads: “You cursed maidan fellows have a very bitter fate! You’ll never eat bread and salt from your next-door neighbor’s plate!” Of course, this saying might be interpreted, so I am told, in an entirely different though equally poetic way: “O, you accursed pitch makers, what a bitter fate you wield! You do not even know how to eat food from a stranger’s unfamiliar field.” Two quite different and unrelated meanings, but with the same negative inclination.
Although largely unknown to Westerners and missing from most English, French and German dictionaries, the word “maidan” does occur with that town square meaning in other languages in Eastern Europe in both the Balkans and in the Caucasus. For example, the Bulgarians have “magden,” the Serbians “meiden,” the Armenians “maitan,” and the Georgians “moedani.” Unlike Western Europeans, over the centuries all of those peoples have had close contact with the Turks and, in the case of the Armenians and Georgians, also with the Persians.
Little used in standard literary Polish, historical instances of the term can, however, be found in some Polish documents and historical books. The Polish novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz, in his “Trilogy,” and the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, in his “Notes from the House of the Dead,” both probably took it from such sources in their various writings, or, in the case of Dostoevsky, from the colloquialisms current among various Turkic ethnic minorities in the Russian Empire.
The oldest Polish usages indicate a military connection. So a 1624 example says a maidan is a “place or field in a military camp,” and many similar examples occur. Samuel Linde’s great Polish dictionary, which was published at the start of the 19th century, even cites a Latin example with the spelling “majdan,” referring to the field where the king’s soldiers divided their booty. And Waclaw Przemyslaw Turek’s more recent dictionary of Arabisms in Polish says that in the street language of late 19th century Warsaw a “majdaniarz” was a newspaper boy on a bicycle who delivered newspapers to various places.
Finally, the word was also sometimes adopted into a surname, and even today occasionally survives among the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of early Ukrainian immigrants to North America. One of the best examples of such an ancestor was Yakiv Maidanyk (or Jacob Maydanyk, to use his own spelling), the famous pioneer-era cartoonist in western Canada, whose character “Vuyko Shteef” was very popular in the 1920s and 1930s. This name may have been derived from that second, alternate, and much less desirable meaning of the word, for Constantine Andrusyshen’s “Ukrainian-English Dictionary” informs us that a “maidanyk” was primarily “a worker in a pitch factory.”
So, from ancient Aramaic, through Persian, Arabic and Turkish, to Kozak Ukraine, to the Canadian Prairies, and then again, over to the Euro-Maidan, this interesting but not so familiar word, with more than a single meaning, and probably origin, has come a very long way.
Thomas M. Prymak, Ph.D., is a historian and research associate with the Chair of Ukrainian Studies, Departments of History and Political Science, University of Toronto. He has taught at several Canadian universities and published widely in the field. His most recent book is “Gathering a Heritage: Ukrainian Slavonic and Ethnic Canada and the U.S.A.” (University of Toronto Press, 2015).