YOUNGSTOWN — Spend five minutes in Youngstown, and it’s clear that food is a cornerstone of the community, which comprises smaller communities of all kinds.

The Simply Slavic Festival is one of the younger cultural celebrations in the city, but it’s no less important to those who hold those traditions dear.

The winner of this year’s baking competition, which took place Saturday at the SMARTS Community Art School downtown, is a first-time contestant but by no means a stranger to Eastern European foods.

“All four of my grandparents were Croatian, so I have nobody to blame but Croatia for what this is here,” said Ron Ples of Canfield, pointing to himself. “I’ve been steeped in this since I was able to walk.”

The former Canfield High School social studies teacher won for his kifli, a recipe he learned from his grandmother who, like any good Croatian boy, he calls “Baba.”

He makes the kifli often for friends and family, for weddings and other special events, and it was their encouragement, he said, that led him to enter this year’s contest.

“I’m the keeper of the family recipes, so for the holiday I’m the one who makes all the traditional foods,” Ples said. “What I’m very grateful for and impressed by is how many of my younger family members are interested in keeping this going. They don’t know how to make this stuff, but they want to. This is what we have, this is our tradition. So even though I’m getting older and it’s getting tougher, I have to do it, because I feel it’s appreciated and it’s nice to know they want to keep it going.”

For Yvonne Palagano of Boardman, the story is similar. She won third place for her nut and raisin kolachi, a recipe from her Slovak mother, the late Joann Sipus. It was also appreciated by her Croatian father’s side of the family.

“My mom, who just passed in November, always baked for us. She never went to the bakery, she always made everything fresh,” Palagano said. “She just kept all the Christmas and Easter traditions alive, and I learned how to bake kolachi from her.”

Palagano furnished most of the cookies for her daughter’s wedding reception, and every year her Easter bread and kolachi are everyone’s favorite desserts after dinner.

Like Ples, Palagano said the culture lives on through the food, and she sees the Simply Slavic festival as a perfect celebration of that.

“It keeps your ancestors alive, it keeps all the traditions going, and it just gives you a good feeling being around all the people that you can talk to, and hear the stories,” she said.

This year, there were seven entrants, but two did not show up to Saturday’s event. The four-person judging panel honored Ples and Palagano, as well as second-place winner Skomra Lotz for her torta dobosza.

Baking contest chairperson Marta Mazur, owner of Krakus Polish Deli on Market Street in Boardman, was the original winner of the baking competition.

A Polish immigrant, she came to the United States in 1981, living in the New York and Connecticut region.

“When I came here to see my family, I would bring coolers full of kielbasa from the east coast,” she said.

When she moved here, to avoid that drive back east or going to Cleveland and Pittsburgh for those foods, she decided to open up her store. “I thought there would be a market.”

Ples notes that the market is definitely there, because the foods that he and others of Slavic descent in the Valley make and enjoy are harder to find.

“It was the churches, and that unfortunately is slowly going away, because they don’t have the volunteers to make the stuff so it’s up to just the families to keep it going,” he said. “A lot of these recipes, we lost them, even in our family.”

Before his sister died, they worked together to find and restore the recipes within the family traditions.

“We slowly did start resurrecting these recipes so we would be able to pass them on,” he said. “My next big project is a family cookbook to record all the family recipes and make copies and pass them on.”

Mazur said the people who come into her store have similar stories to Ples.

“They remember the food at home or going over to their neighbor’s house, they were exposed to these foods, it’s kind of part of their childhood,” she said.

Even if they weren’t part of such a family tradition, they lived in neighborhoods with people who were, and who would share these foods with them.

That’s why she loves the Simply Slavic festival so much.

“This event brings a lot of people together and they dig up a lot of those old recipes and it’s ‘my grandmother made this’ or ‘my aunt made this,'” she said. “Our food is comfort food, so we don’t mind if you put on a little weight with our food, because it makes you feel good.”

Laurel Tombazzi of Cleveland was one of the four judges. She’s also the chairperson of the Eastern European Congress of Ohio, and Mistress of Ceremonies for the SImply Slavic festival for 12 of its 14 years.

For her, festivals like this are just part of keeping Slavic traditions alive in Ohio, and Tombazzi has lobbied hard in Columbus for the cause. She’s part of the reason there is an Eastern European heritage license plate. And last year, Gov. Mike DeWine signed into law a congressional package that established the Commission on Eastern European Affairs.

“When I’m talking to the representatives and senators down at the statehouse, I let them know this festival draws 5,000 to 6,000 people over the weekend, and this is not something small,” she said. “It’s something that really should be paid attention to by the people in Columbus.”

The commission did not come with the $442,000 in funding she requested, and some ethnic groups were left out, including Greeks, Ashkenazi Jews, and even Tombazzi’s own Carpatho-Rusyns. But to her, it’s a good start.

While the commission, once funded, could help the Simply Slavic festival and others in Ohio with costs like liquor licenses and tent and facility sponsorships, it is more about creating a foundation for welcoming Eastern European immigrants.

Ohio is home to about 5 million Poles, 167,000 Ukrainians, 67,000 Hungarians, and 137,000 Slovaks, Tombazzi said. That’s to say nothing of the Belarusians, Bosnians, Herzegovinians, Bulgarians, Croatians, Czechs, Serbians, Macedonians, Montenegrans, Russians and Slovenians mentioned on the Simply Slavic website. She wants the commission to find ways to equally support all of Ohio’s Eastern Europeans.

“When they come here, they’re going to need a place to find support for housing,” she said. “This is another vehicle to welcome and keep people here, if we are open to Eastern Europeans. So, say if Serbians come here, we’re in a position to make them feel at home.”

Serbians don’t have a lot of representation in Ohio, but they do in Chicago, and Tombazzi doesn’t want to see Ohio lose out on the cultural and economic contributions of those newcomers and others.

“People stay in clusters,” she said, citing the Chicago Serbians and the Bulgarian population in Cincinnati. She said Ohio has seen many of its Jewish, African-American and Latino communities enjoy great success and believes the commission can learn to reproduce that for Slavic populations.

For now, the Slavic populations of Northeast Ohio and Western Pennsylvania — Ples, for example, said he has family from Cleveland and Pittsburgh who attend — can enjoy all the traditional fun that begins downtown at 5 p.m. on Friday and continues all day Saturday.

Seeking volunteers

Simply Slavic, Youngstown’s premiere celebration of Slavic culture and heritage, is seeking volunteers to help with the 2025 event, which is Friday and Saturday at the Youngstown Foundation Amphitheatre. Volunteers are needed for festival set up and take down, to work information booths, offer attendees assistance and provide stage and entertainment support. To volunteer, email volunteer@simplyslavic.org.