The Giant Perogy of Glendon

There are two ways to tell the world who you are. You can put it on the welcome sign — or you can build a perogy roughly the size of a school bus, spear it on a fork, and raise the whole thing over your town park.

Glendon, Alberta chose the fork.

Dinner, Twenty-Seven Feet Up

The Giant Perogy went up in 1991, and it has been Glendon’s unmistakable landmark ever since: a golden, crimped-edge perogy — a pyrogy, in the local spelling — speared on an enormous fork, standing about 27 feet tall over a village of a few hundred people in east-central Alberta.

It belongs to a proud prairie family of giants. Not far away, Vegreville guards the world’s largest pysanka, a towering Ukrainian Easter egg, and Mundare answers with a giant sausage. Drive this corner of Alberta with an appetite and the horizon keeps serving courses.

Why a Perogy?

Because around here, the perogy isn’t a side dish. It’s the headline.

This is Ukrainian-Canadian country, settled by families who brought their recipes across an ocean and then fed generations of farm kids, church suppers, and wedding dances with them. A perogy is dough, potatoes, cheese, work, and love — pinched shut by hand, one at a time, usually by somebody’s baba, usually faster than you can count.

Glendon didn’t build a statue to a food. It built a statue to its grandmothers.

The Festival Rule

When Glendon celebrates its pyrogy festival each summer, the statue stops being the biggest perogy story in town. Long tables come out, the volunteers fire up the fry pans, and the same dish that towers over the park gets served the proper way: boiled, pan-fried in butter and onions, buried under sour cream.

This is the secret of every great roadside giant in Canada. The statue gets you off the highway. The supper makes you stay.

First we built the perogy. Then we ate our way to the statue’s standard.

Worth the Drive

Stand under the fork at golden hour, when the whole statue glows the colour of a properly fried perogy, and you’ll understand: the giants of the prairies aren’t jokes. They’re declarations. Glendon looked at its history — the farms, the churches, the supper tables — and said, that, but taller.

Then it fed everybody. That’s the most Albertan sentence there is.