Most people are buried along with their spouses, their children, perhaps even the family dog. But when Pauline Chorna, Annie Hrynchak, Anna Baran and Nellie Handiak died over the span of three decades, they did not waver in their plan. The four women are exactly where they wanted to be, buried shoulder-to-shoulder under a pink granite tombstone that lists their names beneath a single word: “FRIENDS.”

Under the shade of a white oak, the unexpected inscription has become a landmark of sorts for the joggers and dog walkers who frequent Prospect Cemetery, a reason to pause and contemplate the stories buried beneath their feet.

While the women are far from Prospect’s most famous residents — the cemetery is the eternal home of the Group of Seven’s J.E.H. MacDonald, after all — they represent one of its more unusual interments and, arguably, Toronto’s most enduring friendship.

Their communal gravestone is also a mystery to be solved. “Friends” — these seven letters explain the connection but reveal so little about the four women who chose to be forever defined by this word.

For passersby who lean close to study the inscription, the questions are always the same: Who were these women and why did they decide to spend eternity together?

For the Golden Girls of Prospect Cemetery, their stories began more than 7,500 kilometres outside of Toronto, in the pastoral villages that dot the verdant foothills of the Carpathian Mountains.

The mountain range begins in western Slovakia and arcs through Poland and Ukraine before tapering off in Romania. Canadians who have never heard of the region would at least recognize its most famous son; when Andy Warhol used to say “I come from nowhere,” the truth was his family — the Varholas — hailed from Mikova, a Carpathian hamlet located in present-day Slovakia.

People from Warhol’s “nowhere” might call themselves Ruthenians, Rusyns, Carpatho-Rusyns, or Carpatho-Russians and in the early 20th century, there was a mass migration to North America, spurred by bleak economic conditions back home. Between the early 1920s and the Great Depression, some 15,000 to 20,000 immigrants from the Carpathian Mountains settled in Canada, with the vast majority in southern Ontario, according to University of Toronto historian Paul Robert Magocsi.

Most came from the Lemko region that was then part of Poland, including a young Anna Baran. Back then, she was still Anna Hulik and passed her days tending her father’s sheep in their tiny village. When she decided to pursue a better life in North America, her father likely went to a moneylender to borrow the $300 or $400 needed for the overseas journey, according to her son, William Baran, who is now 86.

Baran doesn’t know when or where his mother first met the three women with whom she would eventually share a grave. He’s heard that maybe they met on the same ship bound for Canada but Nellie Handiak’s daughter, Jeannie Lindo, is skeptical of this theory.

As far as she knows, her mother was sponsored by her brother to come to Canada in 1929, landing in Kapuskasing before relocating to Winnipeg, where she married her first husband. They had two children and eventually settled on a 14-acre fruit farm near Hamilton.

But when Lindo was 5 or so, her father suffered severe heat stroke from which he never recovered and died a decade later. Handiak continued running the farm single-handedly, even after she remarried in 1954 and moved to Toronto.

“For a couple of years before she sold it, she used to go there every weekend to work,” Lindo recalls. “She made me what I am today, independent as heck. She was a very strong woman.”

The four friends were all made from strong stock. “We used to say about baba: ‘strong like bull,’” recalls Baran’s granddaughter, Jo-Ann.

Baran once described how Lemko immigrants were driven overseas by extreme economic hardship, only to arrive in Canada on the cusp of the Great Depression, where they struggled with unemployment and “rampant racist discrimination.”

“Coming to Canada we did not find what we all hoped for at all — work, money and a better life,” she wrote in a 1964 article excerpted in a book called From the Carpathian Mountains to Canada. “It was very hard for our immigrants to cope with this situation in a foreign country.”

She described how Lemko girls became “servants in homes with very little compensation” and workers organized strikes or protests that occasionally erupted into riots, where “police beat up the marchers viciously.” The most desperate among them travelled across Canada by jumping onto the roofs of freight trains, in search of better work. “Our men called them riding the rabbits,” Baran wrote.

For Baran, her own difficulties came to a head in 1938. She had married Matthew Baran in Saskatchewan, a man who loved cars so much he started a taxi business when they moved to Toronto. Matthew opened an office near Queen St. W. and Bathurst St., where he set up a cot, his son recalls; when the phone rang, he would dash into the night and pick up his fare.

On April 1, 1938, Baran was driving his taxi on Lakeshore Rd. when he crashed into a lamppost and the steering wheel crushed his chest, breaking his ribs and likely puncturing his lungs. Police charged him with reckless driving but he died a week later at the age of 39.

Anna Baran found herself widowed and the single mother of two children under 5. Her husband had been driving two passengers when he crashed and they decided to sue. “She had nothing,” her son recalls. “They cleaned everything out.”

He remembers this as an impoverished time of “eating a lot of macaroni and milk.” His mother eventually found work cleaning boxcars at the CN railyard and he remembers spotting her occasionally on his way to Fort York, where he and his friends played cops and robbers. Leaning over the Bathurst St. bridge, he would see his mother below, her pushcart filled with brooms and Annie Hrynchak by her side — the same woman who would eventually be buried next to his mother at Prospect Cemetery.

Baran says his mother was the godmother of Hrynchak’s only son, Bill, who died in 2014. The Star couldn’t reach Hrynchak’s surviving relatives but Baran remembers a woman every bit as strong and stern as his mother. Lindo, who knew Hrynchak later in life, recalls a refined woman always “dressed to the nines — full makeup, earrings, everything.”

Neither Baran nor Lindo remember much about Pauline Chorna, the fourth woman buried with their mothers. According to the tombstone inscriptions, Chorna was the first to die in 1977; she was also the oldest of the four women, born in 1900.

Her obituary said she had one son, Walter, and two grandsons. One of them, Steven Kobelyk, said his father died last year and he personally doesn’t know much about his “baba,” though he believes she immigrated to Canada in the ’30s with her husband, Frank.

In Canada, Frank met another woman so the couple split. But Frank had a friend named Mike Tychanych, who worked in the upholstery business and took a shine to Pauline. “He asked his permission (to date her),” Kobelyk says. “And then it was OK.”

So Pauline and her new beau moved in together at 615 Dufferin St., a house they eventually shared with Chorna’s son and his French-Canadian partner, Cecile.

Cecile Kobelyk, 91, remembers her former mother-in-law as “very tiny and cute.” “Baba was a good woman,” she says. “She was as sweet as can be.”

But even though they lived together for years, the two women barely talked; Chorna only spoke her mother tongue, which Kobelyk believes to be Ukrainian. “She said my name, ‘Cece,’ but she never spoke English,” she remembers.“We just looked at each other and knew what the other was saying.”

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Kobelyk had broken up with Walter by the time Chorna died but she knows her former mother-in-law was buried in Prospect Cemetery with three other women. The reasoning behind the unusual decision is a mystery to her, however.

She never knew Chorna’s friends, just that she had a community she clearly cared about. When Kobelyk thinks back to life with her former mother-in-law, she pictures an aproned Chorna in the kitchen, bent over a pot of boiling water. Every Saturday, Chorna made endless pierogies stuffed with cheese and mashed potato, while Kobelyk sat at the kitchen table and closed each one, pinching and pinching until her thumbs were sore.

But most of this food was taken elsewhere to be eaten, by people Kobelyk didn’t know. Their home at 615 Dufferin was never the epicentre of Chorna’s social scene; that would have been another building, which Kobelyk never visited herself.

“There wasn’t many people coming to the house,” she says. “They always met at the hall.”

The hall was tucked inside a three-storey building most Torontonians have likely passed on their travels downtown, without realizing it was once the bustling cultural home for an obscure Central European community.

Built in 1881, the original ground-floor tenant of 280 Queen St. W. was Mara’s Groceries and Liquors, the first store to display its wares behind plate-glass windows, according to Toronto Architecture: A City Guide. The ornate Queen Anne-style building has since housed a menswear store, bookstore, the production team behind the CBC drama Street Legal and — according to the book, Haunted Toronto — a ghost so “malicious and evil” it caused four tenants to flee their upper-floor apartments.

Today, 280 Queen is home to one of the 60-plus locations of fashion retailer Aritzia, a bona fide success story of Canadian capitalism that reported a net revenue of $743.3 million in the 2018 fiscal year. But the building is currently owned by a fervently communist society, the kind that once hung portraits of Stalin and Lenin on its walls and hosted dignitaries from the former Soviet Union in its ballroom.

Around the corner from Aritzia’s gleaming window displays, there is a side door with a sign that reads “Friendship House.” A directory lists several tenants, including the “Canadian Friends of Soviet People,” but property records show the building is owned by the Alexander Duchnovych Society of Carpatho-Russian Canadians.

According to the book From the Carpathian Mountains to Canada, which was published by the Alexander Duchnovych Society, the organization was incorporated in 1982 by a dozen executive members. They include three of the four friends buried together at Prospect Cemetery — Anna Baran, Annie Hrynchak and Nellie Handiak (who, at that point, went by her married surname, Drotarowska) — and Mike Tychanych, the partner of Pauline Chorna.

The book’s author is still alive, but his son, Michael Lucas Jr. — one of the society’s current directors, according to corporate records — declined interview requests on his father’s behalf.

But in his book, Lucas explains the society went through several iterations and locations before it was decided they needed a cultural home specifically for Carpatho-Russians. According to records at the City of Toronto Archives, they took ownership of 280 Queen in 1950, when the property value was assessed at $20,250. Suffice to say, the building has since appreciated considerably; a much smaller building down the street recently sold for $7.8 million.

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The society once boasted 247 members and 38 per cent belonged to the Communist Party, Lucas wrote. While his book covers a lot of ground — from the history of Carpatho-Russians to descriptions of the society’s cultural activities — a prominent theme is a love for the former U.S.S.R.

Lucas describes the breakup of the Soviet Union as “temporary” and refers to Mikhail Gorbachev, the country’s final leader, as the “second coming of Judas.” “Socialism is and will be the future for all the human race!” he wrote in one section.

On a webpage dedicated to Lucas’ 80th birthday, a magazine called Northstar Compass described a celebration at 280 Queen where birthday greetings were read aloud by Lucas, including from then-prime minister “Steven” (sic) Harper, former Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion and Vladimir Putin.

“We highly appreciate your sincere contribution to the promotion of friendship, mutual understanding and bringing together of people of our two countries,” reads the message signed by “Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation.”

The Carpatho-Russian identity is one that is deeply complex and divided along religious, national and political lines, according to historian Magocsi, who chairs U of T’s Ukrainian Studies department and is of Carpatho-Rusyn heritage.

While Carpatho-Russians speak a language related to Ukrainian, and come from an area Ukrainians consider within their ethnolinguistic boundaries, many “actively reject identification as Ukrainians,” Magocsi wrote in his 1999 book, Of the Making of Nationalities There is No End. Their poverty-stricken conditions in Canada also “led to strong anti-clerical left-wing political and social attitudes,” he wrote, as well as an affinity for the Soviet Union, the world’s “first worker’s state.”

For their part, many Ukrainian-Canadians and other immigrants from the region regarded the politics of these Soviet-loving Carpathians with disdain. In his book, Lucas recalls how he was closing up the Queen St. hall one night when he spotted a tall man sitting alone.

“Before I could duck, he threw a chair at me breaking my sax and violin to pieces, yelling I shall kill you, you communist bastard!” Lucas wrote, later complaining the man was only reprimanded with 30 hours of community work because the judge understood why this “Polish patriot” would want to fight against communism.

For some, this communist orientation was alienating and younger Carpatho-Russians turned away from the community. When it comes to the four friends of Prospect Cemetery, their children who spoke to the Star all identified as Ukrainian.

Some also distanced their mothers from the society’s communist leanings. Lindo says her mother’s main attraction to the hall was its many concerts, dances and social gatherings — and, of course, her friends. “I often said to my mother, ‘What are you doing in a communist place?’” she recalls. “She said it’s not a communist place, it’s a social club.”

According to Lucas’ book, Anna Baran appears to have been the most politically active at the society, where she was the head of the “women’s section.” Her granddaughter remembers how her baba loved vacationing in Cuba and had a fondness for Fidel Castro, but says she also used to bristle whenever she was teased for “being a red.” “She’d get mad. ‘Don’t call me red!’” Jo-Ann Baran laughs.

When asked about his mother’s political leanings, William Baran says one story springs to mind. In the winter after his father died, the family was living on welfare with no coal to heat the furnace of their Denison Ave. row house. His mother begged several politicians for help but only one came through.

He remembers hearing a loud noise one day and running to the basement, where coal was pouring in through the window. “She had asked Tim Buck of the Communist Party and told him the problem,” he says. “And he sent the coal in.”

Baran agrees, however, that his mother’s main attraction to 280 Queen was the community she found there. She and her friends spent every Saturday at the hall, first cooking up a feast of pierogies, cabbage rolls and meat-on-a-stick, and then dancing into the wee hours of the night.

Whenever the women came over, the house would fill with their raucous laughter and occasional bickering over whose village back home was superior. “They liked fun, I could tell you that,” he says. “They’d always be singing; I guess it made them feel like they were back in the old country. We even had an old dog called Blackie and he would howl when they were all singing together.

“They were best friends.”

In the late ’60s, Lindo was living in Bermuda when her mother called and broke the news.

“She said, ‘You don’t have to worry about paying for my funeral,’” she recalls. “She told me they went to Prospect Cemetery, her, Annie, Anna Baran, and Pauline, and they bought a cemetery plot.

“I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding. What about the headstone? And she goes, ‘Oh, we got that too. We’re gonna be ‘friends.’”

When Lindo asked why, her mother’s answer was: cards. Aside from their dances at the hall, the women’s favourite activity was playing cards together, especially a game called hola. “It was like a rummy game, because they’d go bang bang bang bang bang bang then someone would lose,” Baran recalls.

They loved playing cards so much, in fact, they never wanted to stop — so when they died, they would be buried together and continue playing in the afterlife.

Lindo found this “hilarious.” “I was quite taken aback,” she says. “My mother was old-fashioned to a point. Where did she come up with this? It’s usually all family, family, family, right?

“But they were so forward thinking that they decided to forget their children and grandchildren and whatever,” she continued. “They said, ‘We’re just gonna do this,’ and they did.”

Lindo doesn’t know which of the four came up with the crazy idea but suspects her mother — and according to cemetery records, she’s right. On Oct. 9, 1968, Nellie Handiak purchased a plot at Prospect Cemetery for herself and three other women, with the specific request they be buried side by side, not stacked on top of each other like in other shared graves.

But only nine years passed before the plot received its first interment, Pauline Chorna, who died on Jan. 30, 1977. Annie Hrynchak was next, passing away on Feb. 6, 1993, followed by Anna Baran, on Feb. 6, 1996. Nellie Handiak was the last to go, spending a full decade without her friends before dying on June 22, 2006, at the age of 97.

Nearly four decades had gone by since Handiak bought the plot with her three best friends. “It was lonely (towards the end), because all her friends were gone,” Lindo says.

As radical as it was for the times, nobody in the family was upset by the women’s decision to be buried together, William Baran says. “They went through a hard time in life and they relied on one another to help each other, to make life more livable,” he says. “And they decided to maintain that relationship through death.”

To find the women today, pass through the cemetery’s white gates on the north side of Rogers Rd. and follow the gentle curve of the road to section 21, where they’re wedged between the Mills and Wasendas.

There, they will always be, four friends playing cards. Before the final burial of these forever friends of Prospect Cemetery, Handiak’s daughter fulfilled one of her mother’s last requests: She slipped a deck of cards into her casket.

Correction — January 7, 2019: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly referred to the “unusual internment” instead of interment.