Ihor Karpovych Rachok (* 25 February 1937, Lavirkove village, Talalaiv district) is a bandura player at the school of Yevhen Adamtsevych and Fedir Spivak. Honoured Worker of Culture of Ukraine since 2008.
He was born in the family of a former Cossack officer, Karp Rachko, the nephew of a senior officer of the UPR Army. According to his childhood memories, during the Second World War, Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, German, and later Stalinist soldiers took turns in his family home in the village of Lavirkove. He learnt several Italian folk songs from the Italian soldiers.
After the war, he practically worked as a hard labourer, repairing highways.
The path to creativity
From his father, he learnt to play the mandolin and guitar, and later the harmonica. At the call of his soul, he sought to master the Ukrainian musical instrument - the bandura. In 1964, having bought an old bandura, he walked 20 kilometres to study at the school of Fedir Spivak, a former member of the Kyiv Bandura Choir who lived in the village of Berezivtsi. The same distance was covered in the opposite direction to Romny, where his other bandura teacher, Yevhen Adamtsevych, lived.
Having mastered music notation, he was engaged in musical self-education. His remarkable musical abilities were evidenced by the fact that, using the book "Melodies of Ukrainian Folk Dumas" by the prominent Ukrainian musicologist Filaret Kolessa, he learnt and included in his repertoire several dumas, such as: Duma about Marusya Bohuslavka, Slave Cry, Duma about Oleksiy Popovych. His repertoire also included historical songs about Savva Chaly, the destruction of the Zaporizhzhia Sich, and Khortytsia. He had a pleasant voice and sang in a peculiar kobzar style.
Personality.
Rachok was a deeply religious man, steadfast in his Orthodox faith, well read in the Holy Scriptures. The most convincing proof of his belief is the example of the miracles created by Jesus Christ. A regular listener of foreign Ukrainian radio programmes, he was politically advanced. He was proud of his late uncle, a participant in the Liberation Movement in the Ukrainian People's Republic Army. In the small village of Lavirkove, he had neither like-minded people nor a worthy interlocutor. He said of his fellow villagers that only "material people" lived around him.
Rachok hardly ever left his village. He would only go to church to visit Romny on holidays. After his parents died, he lived alone. Sometimes he was visited by fans. Rachko's repertoire was constantly expanding.
In the late 1970s, Ihor got married. His wife Maria had an apartment in Romny. She worked in a pharmacy. They got together on the basis of their common Christian faith. However, he continued to live in Lavirkove, and his wife came to visit him only in her free time.
He met Heorhii Kyrylovych Tkachenko with his old world bandura. Stunned by the sound of this bandura, Rachok was eager to buy one for himself. He was especially impressed by its extraordinary lightness and smaller size (Rachok had a bulky and heavy bandura made in Chernihiv, which made it difficult to travel with it). He ordered the bandura from the famous musical master Vasyl Snizhnyi (it was the last bandura Vasyl Snizhnyi made, after which he died).
Critics' opinions
The famous Kyiv bandura player Heorhiy Tkachenko called I. Rachko a true kobzar and a great Ukrainian patriot. The dumas performed by I. Rachko are an example of recitation in a state of emotional tension with the initial cry of "hey, hey", characteristic of dumas, the so-called high cries in the upper register and their expressive transitions to the lower register in the dumas' typical Dorian sound system against the background of the expressive clucking of the bandura.
